OF SELBORNE 183 



LETTER XXXIV 



TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRINGTON 



Selborne, May 9, 1776. 



Dear Sir, 



" admorunt ubera tigres." 



We have remarked in a former letter how much incon- 

 gruous 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 complacency, 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 carni- 

 vorous and predaceous one ! 



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

 ferocious genus oi Feles, the murium ko, 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 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. 



