NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 269 
In order to give an idea of the scope of the work, and of the 
thorough manner in which all the details have been treated, we 
need only refer to the headings of the chapters, which are as 
follow :—The Cat’s general form; the Skin and its Appendages. 
The Skeleton of the Head and Trunk. The Skeleton of the 
Limbs. The Muscles. The Alimentary System. The Organs 
of Circulation. The Organs of Respiration and Secretion. The 
Nervous System and Organs of Sense. Development. Psycho- 
logy. Different kinds of Cats. The Cat’s place in Nature, and 
the Pedigree and Origin of the Cat. 
To the general reader, no doubt the two most interesting 
chapters will be those on the origin of the domestic Cat, and on 
the different kinds of Cats. In the first of these Professor 
Mivart favours the opinion that our domestic Cat is of Egyptian 
origin, and quotes some interesting notices illustrative of its 
great antiquity. He rejects the view that it has descended from 
the European Wild Cat, now rarely met with in the British 
Islands, for, he argues, had this been so, it would have been 
easily procurable, and would not have been so highly valued as it 
was even so late as a thousand years after the Roman invasion. 
For, while the domestic Cat was rare and therefore precious, the 
Wild Cat continued to be common during the Middle Ages. 
With regard to the present existence and distribution of the 
Wild Cat in the British Islands, we have no doubt Professor 
Mivart would have modified some of the views which he has 
expressed had he perused the statistics on the subject recently 
published by Mr. Harvie Brown in this Journal.* 
We cannot concur in the opinion that the stories of Wild Cats 
in Ireland (where Felis catus is unknown) probably refer to the 
progeny of domestic Cats run wild; for we are satisfied from all 
we have heard and read on the subject that the Irish Wild Cat, 
so called, is the Marten. En passant, we may point out a mistake 
which occurs in a foot-note on page 6. It was not Mr. Mills but 
Mr. A. H. Cocks who succeeded in getting the wild and domestic 
Cat to breed together in confinement, and who ascertained the 
curious fact that the period of gestation in the Wild Cat is sixty- 
eight days, or twelve days longer than the ordinary gestation 
*  Zoologist,’ 1881, pp. 8—23. 
