WILD-CATS AT THE ZOO 
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infinitely surly. The only stripes distinctly marked 
are two on either side of the head. 
Though the list of so-called wild-cats includes 
nearly twenty species, there is only one, besides the 
animal we have described, which seems to compete 
with it as the possible undescended great original of 
the “ bundle of concepts ” which civilized man has in 
his mind when, with reference to all the varieties of 
the domestic animal, he uses the abstract term “ cat.” 
This is the “ chaus,” or jungle-cat, which bears some- 
what the same geographical and tribal relation to a 
Scotch or Russian wild-cat as a Pathan tribesman to a 
Highlander. The Scotch wild-cat is found with very 
little variation throughout Northern and Central 
Europe, across the steppes of Northern Asia, as far as 
the southern limits of the Nepaul Hills. At a height 
of some 8000 ft. his place is taken by another cat, 
equally bold, and far less retiring and solitary, the 
“ chaus,” which is common not only in India, but at 
the roots of the Caucasus, and throughout Northern 
Africa and Upper Egypt. A splendid specimen of 
this Oriental cousin of our wild-cats occupies a cage 
in the same house at the Zoo, under the somewhat 
misleading name of the “ Egyptian cat.” Nothing 
could well be more different from the paintings of the 
sleek tabbies of ancient Egypt, the sacred animals of 
the goddess Bast, petted by priests, and taught to 
catch wild-fowl for their masters in the reedy banks of 
the Nile, than this rough, round, broad-headed, bushy- 
whiskered, “ upstanding ” savage, who has held his 
