Mammals The Cat 
the Brown Tabbies, the Oranges and Creams, the 
Silvers, the Tortoise-shells, and the Whites. 
The short-haired cats show many varieties in the 
matter of color, and some in form. They are the 
Blacks, the Russian Blues, which are not tinged with 
slate, but areintensely blue, the Creams, and Oranges, . 
the Dutch-marked, being white with black or blue or 
cream or orange, the Tabbies, the Tortoise-shells and 
the Whites. The Siamese is pure cream or fawn with 
seal-brown face, ears, legs and tail, and has bright blue 
eyes. Manx and Japanese cats have no tails. 
In an ancient Egyptian picture, a cat with a black 
stripe on the heels is represented as catching birds for 
its master. At Sakkara and Benihassan in Egypt 
are cemeteries of cat mummies, which show how 
much these creatures were prized thousands of 
years before the Christian Era. 
_ Thus puss has been made the companion of man 
for so many centuries that we do not know what she 
was like in her original wild condition. Possibly she, 
like the dog, has several species, in different countries, 
as ancestors. However, there are plenty of wild cats 
still living in many parts of the world, and we can 
judge by studying them what the wild habits of our 
domestic pets naturally were. 
The cat can run rapidly for a short distance, but 
she is not a natural runner like the dog; instead, she 
is fitted with strong hind legs which enable her to 
leap far. She does not get her prey by chasing it; 
she lies in ambush behind some object, or stretched 
along a limb, not too high from the ground, and there 
waits for some unsuspecting creature to pass; then 
she gathers herself tensely and leaps upon her victim 
stunning it with the blow, and seizes it in her sharp 
curved claws, and her sharp tushes. 
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