NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBOKNE. 
151 
kittens, and sometliing gamboling after, which proved to be the leveret 
that the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support 
with 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 Felis, the murium leo, as Linnaeus calls it, should be atFected 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 complacency 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 circumstance 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 Romulus 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 
bloody grimalkin."^ 
" . . . viridi foetam Mavortis in antro 
Procubuisse lupam : geminos huic ubera circum 
Ludere pendeutes pueros, et lambere matrem 
Impavidos : illam tereti cervice reflexam 
Mulcere alternos, et corpora fingere lingua." f 
LETTEE XXXV. 
TO THE SAME. 
Selborne, May 20th, 1777. 
Dear Sir, — Lands that are subject to frequent inundations are 
always poor ; and probably the reason may be because the worms are 
* See *' Observations on Various Parts of Nature," — Cat suckling young squir- 
rels. Similar cases have frequently occurred, and the causes may be partly 
as stated by Mr. White, as mentioned in a note to Constable's edition of 
" Selborne." "We once saw a litter of pigs suckled by a pointer-bitch. " On the 
27th of April, 1820," writes Mr. Broderip in "Zoological Journal," " I saw a cat 
giving suck to five young rats and a kitten. The cat paid the same maternal 
attention to the young rats in licking them and dressing their fur as she did to 
her kitten, notwithstanding the great disparity in size." These occurrences, 
however, take place naturally, for they cannot be forced, as every shepherd 
well knows while attempting to persuade a ewe that has lost her own lamb to 
become a foster-mother. Instinct by smell at once discovers the proposed change, 
and deception is sometimes successful by employing the skin of the dead-born as 
a temporary covering for the other, until it has been once permitted to suck. 
t ' ' The cave of Mars was dressed with mossy greens : 
There by the wolf were laid the martial twins, 
Intrepid on her swellings dugs they hung ; 
The foster dam loU'd out her fawning tongue : 
They suck'd secure, while bending back her head, 
She lick'd their tender limbs ; and formed them as they fed." 
Dryd. Vtrg. Ml. viii. line 840. 
