238 AFFECTION IN A CAT. 



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 desiderium, those tender maternal feel- 

 ings, which the loss of her kittens had awakened 

 in her breast ; and by the complacency and ease 

 she derived to herself from 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 the^r 

 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 1 . 



" Viridi fcetam Mavortis in antro 



Procubuisse lupam : geminos huic ubera circum 

 Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem 

 Impavidos : illam tereti cervice reflexam 

 Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua." 



1 We have also the following note by Mr. White in 

 his Observations : " A boy has taken three little young 

 squirrels in their nest, or eyry, as it is called in those 

 parts. These small creatures he put under the care of a 

 cat who had lately lost her kittens, and finds that she 

 nurses and suckles them with the same assiduity and 

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