1885.] DR. HAMILTON ON THE WILD CAT FROM IRELAND. 



213 



Mr. La Touche says : — " I hare just received your letter. Last 

 Sunday I met one of my Galway cousins, and he told me that he 

 remembered when he was a boy the County Grand Jury gave 

 money for heads of Wild Cats, which were supposed to be most 

 numerous and destructive, and that he well remembered his father's 

 keeper (his father was Sir John Burke, of ^Marble Hill, county 

 Galway) often getting this money. I asked him if he ever saw the 

 Cats, and he says he recollects being shown one or two, and they 

 were Martens, always called Cats by Irish keepers." 



Mr. Kennedy writes : — 



" I do not helieve in the existence of the true Felis catus or Wild 

 Cat as indigenous in Ireland, although Kuox, Maxwell, and others 

 state that they have seen them ; all I know is that Carte, our highest 

 authority here (curator of the Dublin Society's Museum), has been 

 trying for years to get a specimen of it wi-hout success. The ex- 

 amples alluded to are, I imagine, wild tame Cats such as you and I 

 have seen prowling after birds and small vermin in the woods, which 

 do much mischief in this way ; but they are smaller than the Wild 

 Cat and have not the short bushy tail. Your friend will find in 

 Thompson's ' Natural History of Ireland' all that can be said in 

 favour of the Wild Cat existing in Ireland, but that is not conclusive." 



Sir J. W. Wilde writes :— 



" I have known a great number of Cats in my time — gentle, tame, 

 spiteful, venomous, vicious, cruel, clean, dirty, honest, stealing, &c. ; 

 but I never saw a Wild Cat, certainly not iu the west of Ireland ; 

 all Cats I saw there were evidently tame ones that had got into 

 the rocks and become wild." 



In another letter he says : — 



" Mr. La Touche has asked me to communicate with you respecting 

 the existence of the Wild Cat m Ireland. I never met with such an 

 animal, although, both as a sportsman and somewhat of a naturalist, 

 I have had ample opportunities for observation. There is no 

 purely Irish name for Cat, for the word Catt, or, as it is pronounced, 

 Catta,is a mere corruption of the English term. In the 'Proceedings' 

 of the Royal Irish Academy for 1860 you will find a lengthened 

 essay of mine upon the unmanufactured animal remains then 

 belonging to that institution : it contains much curious information 

 on the ancient animals of Ireland. That the Domestic Cat has 

 occasionally strayed from home and gone wild is quite true ; and 

 instances of the kind occurred in my place iu Connemara some years 

 ago, where in a cave by the lake-side a Cat brought out her young, 

 and, frightened by the dogs, would never come near the house 

 again. 



" The only ancient reference which I can now lay hands on is that 

 of the ancient Irish poem treated of in the tract already referred to, 

 where it is said two Cats were procured from the cave of Ratticrohan 

 in county Roscommon, but I see no reason for believing that they 

 were originally wild. The word used in the original MSS. is 

 Chait, but it is evidently a corruption of the EngUsh term." 



Proc. ZooL. See— 1885, No.XV. 15 



