516 ON THE CAT OF THE ANCIENT GREEKS. 



investigation of several years^ given us a list of no less than sixteen 

 land mammals, amongst which there is one new and previously 

 undescribed species, the jEgoceros pictus, the Ibex of the Cyclades. 

 The very general distribution of the rabbit, which in its wild state 

 here is as large as the hare or larger, goes some way towards show- 

 ing that it was indigenous in the area of the Cyclades, as it is sup- 

 posed to have been in the Balearic Islands before they were broken 

 up into an archipelago. But at the same time it is the harder to 

 understand how Aristotle and how the Greek gourmets w^ho fwi^re? 

 kv TTCLo-L Aaywoi? must have known how different a rabbit's flesh was 

 from a hare's, if they had ever eaten it, could have failed to dis- 

 tinguish the one animal from the other, the rabbit being now most 

 abundant there, and having made the Myconos, so often mentioned 

 by these ancients, into a honeycomb with their burrows. But in 

 their days these islands were richer in population, an occasional 

 massacre of Melians having been as nothing to the constant ope- 

 ration of Turkish barbarism ; and if, as I have striven to show, this 

 larger population had in domestication, house by house, such an 

 enemy of the rabbit as the marten is, we have some sort of an ex- 

 planation of the absence of the mention by them of an animal as 

 existing in the Cyclades in classic, which must all but certainly 

 have existed there in geological, as it does also in our own times. 

 The islands, I may add, were probably or certainly better wooded 

 than now; and trees favour the multiplication of the rabbit less 

 than they do that of its many and various enemies. 



2. In my previous paper I said. Article XXVIII. p. 511, ' In the 

 East the felis took both the name and the work of the rival it 

 supplanted.' It is possible that I should have been right in making 

 this statement more extensive, and in saying that the cat of the 

 Egyptians took not only the name yakij, but also the name lktls of 

 its predecessor in the Greek house. For I find from a passage 

 of Tzetzes, 'Chil.' v. 8, quoted by Bochart, ' Ilierozoicon,' i. 986, ^y^ 

 that this authority, if so we may call him, called the aiKovpos by 

 the name of lktls* The passage from Bochart runs thus : ' In 

 Hesychio voce KrtSea, ktls (otl C<^ov ofxoLov yaArJ, viverra est animal 

 feli simile. Proinde putavit Tzetzes esse felis speciem, quod his 

 verbis diserte asserit Chiliadis quinti capite octavo, 



Xkti^ Se ^^ov KOI avrb reKei (1. neKd) dpvi9o<p&yov 

 X(p<Tcuov Kal TiTpaiTOvv filv, aiKovpov KaXov/xey.' 



