OF SELBOBNE, 
233 
sitting in his garden in tlie dusk of tlie evenings lie ob- 
served 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 sup- 
ported with her milk, and continued to support with great 
affection. 
Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivor- 
ous and predaceous one ! ^ 
Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the 
ferocious genus of Felis, 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 
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. 
This incident is no bad solution of that strange circum- 
stance which grave historians as well as the poets assert, of 
exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female wild 
beasts that probably had lost their young. For it is not 
one whit more marvellous that Eomulus and Remus, in their 
infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a 
poor little sucking leveret should be fostered and cherished 
by a blood-thirsty grimalkin. 
" viridi foetam Mavortis in antro 
Procubuisse lupam : geminos huic ubera circum 
Ludere pendentes pueros, et lambere matrem 
Impavidos : illam tereti cervice reflexam 
Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua." 
^ An additional instance, in the case of a cat and squirrels, will be 
found mentioned later in tlie " Observations on Quadrupeds." — Ed. 
