OF SELBOENE 171 



LETTER XXXIV. 



TO THE SAME. 



Dear Sir, 



Selborne, May 9, 1776. 



- admorunt ubera tigres. ' 



We have remarked in a former letter how much incongruous 

 animals, in a lonely state, may be attached to each other from 

 a spirit of sociality ; in this it may not be amiss to recount a 

 different motive which has been known to create as strange a 

 fondness. 



My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which 

 the servants fed with milk in a spoon, and about the same time 

 his cat kittened and the young were dispatched and buried. 

 The hare was soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of 

 most fondlings, to be killed by some dog or cat. However, in 

 about a fortnight, as the master was sitting in his garden in the 

 dusk of the evening, he observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting 

 towards him, and calling with little short inward notes of com- 

 placency, such as they use towards their 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 Feles, the murium leo, as Linnceus calls it, should be 

 affected with any tenderness towards an animal which is it's 

 natural prey, is not so easy to determine. 



This strange affection probably was occasioned by that desi- 

 derium, 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 become 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 



