208 THE NATURAL HISTORY ' [LETT. 
LETTEE LXXVI. 
TO THE HONOURABLE DAINES BARRISGTON. 
" — - — — — — — admornnt ubera tigres." 
" By tigers suckled." 
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 lieljDless 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 despatched 
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 Avith 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 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 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 
