504 DOMESTIC CATS. 



from an early period, as we know from Herodotus and also from 

 the Book of Barucli^; and Cuvier^ could not discover any specific 

 difference between the mummied remains of the domesticated Felis 

 of those days and the similar structures in our own pet cats. Varro 

 (fl. B.C. 28) and Columella (fl. a.d. 20) both speak of the Felis as 

 Appian (fl. a.d. 190) does of the aiXovpoi KaKOfpyoi as animals to be 

 kept out of poultry-pens, but none of these writers speak of the 

 animal as being domesticated ; and Cicero when he speaks, or hints, 

 more suo, that he would speak but for a reluctance to be tedious, de 

 felium ufilitate^ speaks in the same connexion of the ichneumon and 

 the crocodile, and shows us thereby that he had Egypt and not 

 Italy in his eye. The two lines in the Batrachomj^omachia, 5^~5^j 



trXiiaTOV St) yaXerjv irepi5ci5ia ^tis apiarrf, 

 ^ Kal rpo:y\oSvovTa Karci rpuykrjv hpaivH, 



do not seem to compel us to translate yak4r]v by felem, as Kara 

 Tp(oy\r]v may very well mean ^ along and throughout my hole^ and 

 indeed the line 



iyOiaTri ya\kr\ TpwykTji- '4kto<t6€V eXovcra 



may seem to sbow that the catching outside was a rare occurrence, 

 and the inside or musteline method the commoner ^. 



Neither do I think that certain others of my predecessors have 

 been more correct in translating the words in the fifteenth Idyll of 

 Theocritus, the Adoniazusae, line 28, 



at yaXeai /jLaXaKws XPV^^'^^'''^ Ka9ev5cv, 



as though the domestic cat was alluded to by Praxinoe. For though 

 our proverb speaks of the catching of a weasel asleep as a matter of 

 some difiiculty, anybody who has watched the way in which one of 



* 'Epistle of Jeremy, Book of Baruch' (Apocrypha), chap. vi. verse 22. 



^ * Annales du Museum,' An. xi. (1802), p. 234 ; ' Ossemens Fossiles,' Discours Pr^- 

 liminaire, p. Ixii, ed. 1821. 



^ It must be recollected, however, that though a carnivore's body will always pass 

 tolerably easily through a foramen which will allow of the passage of its head, the /xves 

 of the Batrachomyomachia were not rats. Parliamentary institutions not having been 

 introduced into the kingdom of Artemisia, where it is supposed to have been com- 

 posed ; and that as the thirty-first of Babrius' Fables, or indeed measurement with 

 a pair of compasses of even our smallest weasel's interzygomatic diameter, will show, 

 many a mouse-hole will admit a mouse which will not let his enemy in after him. But 

 the ya\fj was essentially troglodytic, though some holes were too small for it, else my 

 argument would fall to the ground, and Sannyrion would not have written — 

 Ti dv yev6fi(i/os (Is ov^v kvhvaoimi ; 

 tpip* 6t yevoifjLTjv yaXrj; 



