282 The Natural History of Selborne 



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 Felts, the murium leo, as Linnasus 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 desiderium, 

 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 circumstance 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 fcztam Mavortis in antro 

 Procubuisse lupam : geminos huic ubera circum 

 Ludere pendentes pueras, et lambere matrem 

 Impavidos : illam tereti cervice reflex am 

 Mule ere alternos, et corpora finger e lingua" 



