NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 151 



kittens, and something gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret 

 that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support 

 with great affection. 



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 Felis, 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 feelings, which the loss of her kittens had 

 awakened in her breast ; and by the complacency and ease she derived 

 to herself from the 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 their 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.* 



" . . . 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." f 



LETTER XXXY. 



TO THE SAME. 



SELBORNE, May 20th, 1777. 



DEAR SIR, Lands that are subject to frequent inundations are 

 always poor ; and probably the reason may be because the worms are 



* See " Observations on Various Parts of Nature," Cat suckling young squir- 

 rels. Similar cases have frequently occurred, and the causes may be partly 

 as stated by Mr. White, as mentioned in a note to Constable's edition of 

 " Selborne." We once saw a litter of pigs suckled by a pointer-bitch. " On the 

 27th of April, 1820," writes Mr. JBroderip in "Zoological Journal," "I saw a cat 

 giving suck to five young rats and a kitten. The cat paid the same maternal 

 attention to the young rats in licking them and dressing their fur as she did to 

 her kitten, notwithstanding the great disparity in size." These occurrences, 

 however, take place naturally, for they cannot be forced, as every shepherd 

 well knows while attempting to persuade a ewe that has lost her own lamb to 

 become a foster-mother. Instinct by smell at once discovers the proposed change, 

 and deception is sometimes successful by employing the skin of the dead-born as 

 a temporary covering for the other, until it has been once permitted to suck. 



f ' ' The cave of Mars was dressed with mossy greens : 



There by the wolf were laid the martial twins, 

 Intrepid on her swellings dugs they hung ; 

 The foster dam loll'd out her fawning tongue : 

 They suck'd secure, while bending back her head, 

 She lick'd their tender limbs ; and formed them as they fed." 



DRYD. VIRO. Mn viii. line 840. 



