DOMESTIC CATS. 505 



the larger mustelines when tame or at least in captivity composes 

 itself to sleep, and the very evident reluctance with which it unrolls 

 itself, when awaked, out of the dog-like convolution into which it 

 has curled itself up, will feel the force of the more correct render- 

 ing. Some of the Alexandrians, again, who were contemporary 

 with Theocritus, used the same word for the tame cats (with which 

 they were more familiar than he, a mere occasional visitor in Egypt, 

 could have been) that Herodotus uses. Callimachus, in his ' Hymn 

 to Ceres,' has, line iii, 



KOI TcLv atXovpov tcLv erpe/xe 6r)pia {jllkkol, 



where the Scholiast in loco gives kolttos as the synonym. 



On the other hand^ the compiler of the collection of foolish stories 

 (which is ascribed falsely to Aristotle, and called the ' De Mira- 

 bilibus Auscultationibus '), who is supposed to have lived about the 

 same time as Callimachus and Theocritus, speaks, as does ^lian 

 after him, N. A. 15. 26, section 28, of a kind of Cyrenian mouse as 

 being TrXaTVirpocrcoiros axnrcp al ydkai ; and it is difficult to think 

 that yaXaX is not intended to stand in this passage for Feles, 

 Section 28 however may have been introduced into this treatise in 

 later times, or possibly the words coo-Trep at yakal may by themselves 

 have found their way there as a gloss from the pen of some wise 

 Byzantine to whom in a later age, when the yakj] of the classic 

 times had resigned both office and name to the aXkovpo^ from Egypt, 

 curaefuH ejusmodi quisquUias coiiscribere. The Batrachomyomachia, 

 it should be observed, is quite free from any taint of Alexandrian 

 or Byzantine impurity, and the use of the w^ord yaXri by writers 

 from these localities does not bear therefore upon its employment in 

 the verses above quoted from it. But though there is no reason 

 for supposing that the Felis domesticus was domesticated in any 

 other country than Egypt before the Christian era, there are many 

 reasons for demurring to the statement ordinarily^ made to the 

 effect that this animal was first spread throughout Europe at the 

 end of the period of the Crusades. On looking into Ducange^s 

 Glossarium, under the words ' Catta ' and ' Cattinae Pelles,' I find 

 that Caesarius, who was the physician-brother of Gregory, the 

 theologian of Nazianzus, and who died a.d. 369, having been the 

 friend of the second Constantine and Constantius, speaks of ivhpvixoi 



^ For example, ' Conversations-Lexicon,' BJ. viii. p. 735 ; Bahr, Hdt. ii. 66. 



