200 NATURAL HISTORY 



LETTER XXXIV. 



TO THE SAME. 



Selborne, May 9, 1776. 

 DEAR SIR, 



" admorunt ubera tigres." 



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. How- 

 ever, 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 fero- 

 cious genus of Feles 7 the murium leo, as Linnaeus calls it, 

 should be affected with any tenderness towards an animal 

 which is it's 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, 



