THE LIFE OF MAMMALS 
ently fossil remains turned up in England and in Belgium, 
which bore closer resemblance to the Egyptian than to the 
European wildcats, and examination revealed that the living 
wildcats of Sardinia and Tuscan Italy were not of the European 
type, but were (and are) a Mediterranean variety of the Egyp- 
tian cat. 
Lastly, research in another direction, namely, of the relics 
from the graves of the early inhabitants of northern Italy, 300 
or 400 years before Christ, and of the earliest remains of 
Roman colonization in Britain, proved that those peoples 
had domestic cats. Now both these places traded with the 
Pheenicians, who were the carriers of Egyptian trade as well as 
of their own; and it is fair to infer that they introduced cats 
from the Levant. Thus all the evidence points to the Egyp- 
tian cat as at any rate the principal source of the house cat of 
Europe, and hence of America and the western world generally. 
Our very word ‘‘ Puss” is only a domestication, so to speak, of 
the name of the Egyptian moon goddess Pasht. 
But this is not the end of the matter. In all parts of the 
world one or another of the smaller wildcats of the country 
have been kept as pets in native houses; and wherever the 
people have been far enough advanced to raise and store grain, 
they have cultivated a cat or some other animal to free their gran- 
aries from thicving mice. It was for this purpose, no doubt, 
that the cats of Egypt were first tamed; and then, to make the 
people prudently keep them and care for them, the priests got 
up a religious story, and invented a beneficient and cheerful 
cat goddess, who, naturally, was said to walk abroad mostly 
by moonlight. It is believed that the early agriculturists of 
Europe subjugated their wildcat to the same end. If so, when 
the Egyptian cats reached Europe they would certainly soon 
meet and interbreed with the native stock, since, if Martorelli 
is right, the two were only distant cousins; and to such crossing 
is probably due the prevalence of banded or “tabby” cats 
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