208 THE NATURAL HISTORY [LETT. 



LETTER LXXVI. 



TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRIXGTON. 



admonint ubera tigres." 



" By tigers suckled." 



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 despatched 

 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 a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous 

 and predaceous one ! 



Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious 

 genus of Felcs, the Murium leo, as Linnrcus 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 dusi- 

 ilerium, 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 



