44 The Carntvora. 
all honour, decided important affairs on the auguries drawn 
from its unearthly yowlings, and even sacrificed human life in 
expiation of the sin of killing it.* 
With all these advantages, it is surprising that it has advanced 
so little, that, with few individual exceptions, it remains in all 
its characteristics an unreclaimed savage. Quite unlike the 
dog, it is incapable of appreciating fun. We cannot play long, 
or in the least roughly, though unintentionally so, with a cat, 
but out come those tenter hooks, as if it were either uncon- 
scious of their power or indifferent to the pain they inflict. 
Whereas the dog will endure infinite annoyance and suffer 
positive torture, rather than close his teeth in anger on the 
hand he loves. 
This ineradicable ferocity might be intelligible if we were 
continually renewing our domestic breeds with wild blood. 
But this is not so. In all probability—almost certainly—the 
cat sitting at our fireside is the direct descendant of hundreds 
of generations of ancestors, which have been in close com- 
panionship with man, and probably of the Egyptian domestic 
animal. It is, at all events, not any longer matter of dispute 
that the European wild cat has no claim to be the ancestor of 
our tame species. On the other hand, the great variety of 
colour and marking points to a mixed origin; and, as in the 
larger felide, we have striped, spotted, tawny, black, and even 
white examples. The pretty little rubiginous cat of India, 
whose body is about 13in. long, exhibits stripes which have 
become broken up into spots on the sides and flanks, and the 
aspect of the face recalls that of many of our cats. It may, 
indeed, not unlikely be one of their common progenitors. 
The variations of colour under domestication might be ex- 
pected to be as capricious as they actually are. There is, too, 
a sexual determination towards certain colours, though this is 
not absolute. Thus, a real tortoiseshell will almost always be a 
female, and a sandy or red tabby will pretty certainly prove to 
* The Egyptians. 
