512 DOMESTIC CATS. 



the half-shed half-house for the ' Small Carnivora * at the Zoological 

 Gardens, and listen there to the remarks of people who overlook 

 the little differences upon which scientific zoology is founded. 

 * They are all cats,' I heard one of these authorities ^ say there one 

 day, albeit there were then plenty of the eminently annuloid 

 viverrines as well as a very typical felis, the Felis chaus, to be 

 compared and contrasted at a single glance and within a few feet 

 of each other. It is not hard to see how the mustelines and viver- 

 rines come to be classed together, seeing that so many members of 

 both families are so markedly elongate, vermiform, tapering and 

 low on their limbs. But the relative proportions in the sides, in 

 the trapezium which four lines, corresponding one to the fore-legs, 

 one to the hind, one to the line of the back, and the fourth to the 

 ground on which the creature stands, make up respectively in a 

 feline and in a viverrine or musteline viewed from the side, are so 

 very different, to say nothing of the all but equally striking differ- 

 ences in the proportions of the skull and jaw diameters, longitu- 

 dinal and transverse, inter se^ firstly, and in relation to the cervical 

 region, secondly, that we must look to points of habit rather than 

 of structural arrangement to account for the imposition of this 

 common name upon creatures to our eyes so different. And I 

 suppose the springy yet silent lightness of their step when placid, 

 and the lightning-like pounce of their attacking step, correlated as 

 they are with a more or less similar armature in tooth and claw, 

 are the points which ' imaginationem ferientia aut intellect um vul- 

 garium notionum nodis astringentia ' have caused the imposition of 

 the common name these animals have had given them. The ar- 

 boreal and nocturnal habits again, correlated with certain modi- 

 fications in the organs of special sense, are common points to the 

 feles and the mustelae, and especially though not exclusively to 

 the martens. Both alike take to trees when pressed by hounds, 

 but since the invention of fire-arms this single device of the ' cats ' 

 is no longer worth as in the old fable more than all the tricks of 

 the fox. The phrase ' up a tree ' was not, perhaps could not have been, 

 anterior to that of ' as sure as a gun.^ The pine marten indeed 

 will, Blasius informs us, sit still on the same place on a bough 



* Strabo, however, uses much the same language in speaking of what must. I think, 

 in all probability have been the common genet, Viverra genetta. Writing of Mauri- 

 tania he says, xvii. c. 3, p. 827 A, Casaubon : — <pipn. h\ koI 70X0? alKovpois teas kuI 

 ojxoias, itX^v oti toL pvyxv ■npoirimoiKi naWov. 



