OP SELBORNE. 307 



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 desiderium, those tender maternal feelings, which 

 the loss of her kittens had awakened higher 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 2 . 



This incident is no bad solution of that strange cir- 

 cumstance which grave historians as well as the poets 

 assert, of exposed children being sometimes nurtured 



2 It is an almost every day occurrence in young dogs to take upon them- 

 selves the office of relieving the domestic cat, with whom they have con- 

 tracted an intimacy by residing at the same hearth, from the inconvenience 

 which the presence of milk occasions them on the destruction of their 

 kittens. It is equally common to witness the cat of a former litter acting 

 under similar circumstances the part of a sucking kitten ; an overgrown 

 but an indulged and happy bantling. In these instances, however, there 

 is not that marked distinction in the habits of the animal performing the 

 office of mother from those of her nursling which belongs to the one no- 

 ticed by Gilbert White, and which has not unfrequently been paralleled. 



All these cases, it may be remarked, bear with no small degree offeree 

 on the nutrition of the young cuckoo by its foster parent. In the higher 

 classes of animals the parental stimulus to nourish after the young have 

 been produced strongly prevails : her own offspring are those towards 

 whom the care of the mother is first extended, as it is for their advantage 

 that the desire is implanted in her: but, failing these, the desire still 

 remains powerful, and will be gratified in favour of any object that will 

 accommodate itself to her views. The gaping mouths and craving cries 

 of her nestlings add to the stimulus which impels the dam to provide for 

 their wants ; and the young cuckoo in the hedge sparrow's nest will not, 

 it is presumed, be less craving than its natural inmates. Its greater bulk 

 and more rapid growth soon enable it to acquire strength enough to 

 remove all rival claimants for any portion of the food provided by the 

 industrious dam, and the destroyer of her progeny thus becomes the sole 

 inheritor of the cares which would have been equally shared among the 

 entire brood. It is not in the hedge sparrow's nest alone that importu- 

 nity and selfishness are thus successful, to the extinction of stronger and 

 more natural ties. E. T. B. 



x 2 



