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Cat is performed equally whether the animal is snugly housed beside the cottage 
fire, or out of doors, exposed to the air. It happens, too, sooner before the actual 
fall of rain, than the prognostics of most other animals. In this last circumstance 
there is a philosophical truth, which it is desirable that some intelligent reader of 
The Naturalist would work out and give to the world, through its pages. The 
domestic Cat is, of all animals with which we are very familiar, by far the most 
electric; that is, the most susceptible to electric action. Clear and dry air is 
well known to be a non-conductor of electric action; and the more dry and clear 
the air is, the more agreeable to Pussey. It is, indeed, highly probable that 
the love of dry air, as much as the love of heat, brings the Cat to bask by the 
fire when the air is damp and raw : but the subject has not been studied with the 
attention which it deserves, for, strange though it may seem to some, the Cat 
may be of more real service to the philosopher, in the study of meteorology, than 
it was to Whittington in acquiring that wealth which enabled him to purchase the 
triple mayoralty, or to Katerfelto in assisting him to impose upon the credulity 
of the multitude, as a conjurer, 
“At his own wonders, wond’ring for his bread.” 
For the investigation of so delicate a fluid as the atmosphere, in the variations 
of its electric state, as resulting from the quantity of humidity in it, and from its 
motions, we want instruments of the most delicate kind; and no one will deny 
that the body of an animal must, under any circumstances, be a far more delicate 
instrument than any which can be made with hands. The finest of these must 
still be made of matter; and, consequently, the atmospheric change must be great 
enough for acting upon matter, before such an instrument can possibly point it 
out. The feeling of the animal, on the other hand, is not matter, but a result of 
the organization of matter ; and, therefore, it must be sensible down to almost the 
extreme of smallness in atmospheric change, or in any other agent by which it is 
affected. Those effects of minute or incipient changes upon delicate animals, 
require a great deal of caution on the part of the observer; hasty conclusions, 
ought not, therefore, to be attempted to be drawn from them. They always 
precede our own observation ; and though they are, in themselves, unerring, we 
must use the same precaution with regard to them as we would do in all other 
jnatters of reasoning : and it is this which brings us to one of the essential points 
of the case—why should the lower animals be more weather-wise than we are ? 
This is a very important question, not only as it concerns those animals, but 
as it bears on the highest—-the immortal-interests of man. Simple as it, at first 
sight, appears, it really involves the whole distinction between animals, which have 
no powers beyond those that result from the organization of material substance, 
and man, whose noblest powers are those which are exercised by an immaterial 
VOL. i. 
E 
