ATTACHMENT OF ANIMALS. 195 



LETTER XXXIV. To THE HON. DAINES BARRINGTON. 



DEAR SIR, Selborne, May 9, 1776. 



" adraorunt 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 riot be amiss to recount a dif- 

 ferent 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 com- 

 placency, 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 Feles, 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 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. 



This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance 



* Endless instances of similar occurrences are upon record, and J have myself seen a female 

 cat suckle a puppy. The parental feelings of small birds operate very strongly when in a state of 

 confinement ; I have continually witnessed birds in an aviary wishing- to feed each other, and 

 some of them will readily attend to any nestlings that are entrusted to their charge. Thus a 

 tree-pipit in my possession brought up a brood of ten young bottletits. Those species, however, 

 which are of a predatory, or at least omnivorous turn, are apt to be much less charitable. Th 

 tits are of this character, and I have known a coletit ( pa rus ater) very deliberately seize, and begin 

 to eat, one of a nest of kinglets which had been confided to its protection. ED. 



o 2 



