This interesting account shows how little difference there is between the habits and the nature of this little wild beast of Great Britain and its big cousins of the African and Indian jungles. In its nocturnal habits, its mode of attack, its bloodthirstiness, and its wanton cruelty, it is just the Tiger over again on a small scale, only less harmful because less powerful. Some idea of its immense strength may be gathered from the fact that it is known to have actually killed men. In some places the Wild Cat is regularly hunted, usually in winter, when the tracks in the snow are easily followed. The sport has the necessary element of danger to no ordinary degree, for the terrible little beast, if wounded, makes straight for the hunter, and attacks him with tooth and claw, and such teeth and such claws are by no means pleasant things to be wounded with. On the whole, we have hardly reason to be sorry that the race is almost extinct in Great Britain. [Illustration: COMMON WILD CAT.] THE DOMESTIC CAT.[47] This animal--_the Cat par excellence_--is, next to the Dog, the flesh-eater which possesses for us the greatest personal interest, as it is, with the exception of the Dog, almost the only quadruped regularly admitted into the society of man, eating from his hand, drinking from his cup, and being to him, if not a firm friend, like its canine relative, at least a comfortable, contented companion, adding greatly by its look of calm repose and its contented purr to the cosiness of the fireside. The origin of the Domestic Cat is so far distant that it is quite uncertain from what wild species it was derived. It is not once mentioned in the Bible, a very curious circumstance, as it was well known in Egypt, and it might have been expected that it would be named, with the Dog, among the unclean animals. Cats “are mentioned in a Sanskrit writing 2,000 years old, and in Egypt their antiquity is known to be even greater, as shown by monumental drawings and their mummied bodies.” From many circumstances it seems probable that the Cat had, like the Dog, a multiple origin, that is, was produced by the commingling of several wild forms. It is certain that our Domestic Cats will breed freely with many of their feral brethren, such as the Common Wild Cat, the Chaus, Viverrine, and Rusty-spotted Cats, &c.