OF SELBOENE. 233 



sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he ob- 

 served his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and 

 calling with little short inward notes of complacency, such 

 as they use towards their kittens, and something gamboling 

 after, which proved to be the leveret that the cat had sup- 

 ported with her milk, and continued to support with great 

 affection. 



Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivor- 

 ous and predaceous one ! l 



Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the 

 ferocious genus of Fells, the murium leo, as Linnscus 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 

 desidcrium, those tender maternal feelings which the loss of 

 her kittens had awakened in her breast; and by the com- 

 placency 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 circum- 

 stance 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 blood-thirsty grimalkin. 



" viridi foetam Mavortis in antro 



Procubuisse lupam : geminos huic ubera circum 

 Ludere pendentcs pueros, et lambere matrem 

 Impavidos : illam tereti cervice reflexam 

 Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua." 



1 An additional instance, in the case of a cat and squirrels, will be 

 found mentioned later in the " Observations on Quadrupeds." ED. 



