208 NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 
Lea ak ox Soy. 
TO THE SAME. 
SELBORNE, May gth, 1776. 
ce 
admérunt ubera tigres.”’ 
DEAR S1R,— We have remarked in a former letter* how much 
incongruous animals, in a lonely state, may be attached to each 
other from a spirit of sociality; in this it may not be amiss to 
recount a different motive which has been known to create as strange 
a fondness. 
My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which the 
servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time his cat 
kittened and the young were dispatched and buried. The hare was 
soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most fondlings, to 
be killed by some dog or cat. However, in about a fortnight, as 
the master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he 
observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling 
with little short inward notes of complacency, such as they use 
towards their kittens, and something gamboling after, which proved 
to be the leveret that the cat had supported with her milk, and 
continued to support with great affection. 
Thus was 2 graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and 
predaceous one ! 
Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious 
genus of Felis, the murium leo,as Linneus calls it, should be 
affected with any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural 
prey, is not so easy to determine. 
This strange affection probably was occasioned by that desi- 
derium, those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her 
kittens had awakened in her breast ; and by the complacency and 
ease she derived to herself from the procuring her teats to be 
drawn, which were too much distended with milk, till, from habit, 
she became as much delighted with this foundling as if it had been 
her real offspring. 
* Letter XXIV. 
