The Natural History of Se I borne 293 



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 gambolling 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 Felis, the murium leo, as Linnaeus 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 de- 

 siderium, 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. 



This incident is no bad solution of that strange circum- 

 stance which grave historians as well as the poets assert, of 

 exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female wild 

 beasts that probably had lost their young. For it is not one 

 whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus, in their 

 infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a poor 

 little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished by a 

 bloody grimalkin. 



"... viridi fcetain Mavortis in anlro 

 Procubuisse lupam : gennnos huic ubera circutn 

 Ludere pendents pueros, et lambere matrem 

 Impavidos : illam tereti cervice refiexam 

 Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingers lingua" 



