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 _Felis_, the _Murium Leo_ (Lion of the Mice), as Linnæus calls it, should be affected with any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural prey, is not so easy to determine. 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 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 suckling Leveret should be fostered and cherished by a Cat. White, in his “Observations,” has another similar anecdote. “A boy has taken three little young Squirrels in their nest, or eyry, as it is called in these parts. These small creatures he put under the care of a Cat who had lately lost her kittens, and finds that she nurses and suckles them with the same assiduity and affection as if they were her own offspring. This circumstance corroborates my suspicion that the mention of exposed and deserted children being nurtured by female beasts of prey who had lost their young, may not be so improbable an incident as many have supposed; and, therefore, may be a justification of those authors who have gravely mentioned what some have deemed to be a wild and improbable story. So many people went to see the little Squirrels suckled by a Cat, that the foster-mother became jealous of her charge, and in pain for their safety, and therefore hid them over the ceiling, where one died. This circumstance showed her affection for these foundlings, and that she supposed the Squirrels to be her own young.” Equally remarkable as an instance of the transference of maternal affection is the tale of the Cat whose kittens were replaced by two out of the five pups belonging to a Spaniel. The Cat brought up her foster children so well, that they were able to run about long before the three left under the charge of their own natural mother. Before long they were removed, and the Cat was inconsolable, until, one day, coming across the Spaniel and her pups, she concluded that the latter were her own lost darlings, and in her eagerness to get them engaged in two successive fights with the Spaniel, in each of which she was victorious, and after each of which she carried away a pup to her own premises, thus getting again, as she thought, her own two children, and the Spaniel being obliged to content herself with one.