208 NATURAL HISTORY OF SEL BORNE. 



LETTER XXXIV. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, May gth, 1776. 



. . . admorunt ubera tigres. " 



DEAR SIR, 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. 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 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 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. 



* Letter XXIV. 



