Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/391

Rh of doors. Mr. A. Petrie's cat would climb up by some list to the click-latch, push it up, and, hanging from the door, similarly push it away from the posts. The cat of Mr. W. H. Michael, of Queen Anne's Gate, St. James's Park, London, jumped four feet to the crank-latch of a casement window, caught hold of the crank with her fore feet, and pressed the window open with her hind feet. A cat belonging to Parker Bowman learned to open a window by turning a swivel and bearing upon the sash.

Some equally curious incidents, showing powers of contrivance and a degree of understanding of the relation of antecedent and consequent, are connected with cats striking door-knockers and ringing bells, or, if unable to do so themselves, asking to have them done. Mr. Belshaw tells, in Nature, of his kitten jumping upon the door and hanging by one leg while it put the other fore paw through the knocker and rapped twice. A London cat is described in Nature which by standing on her hind legs would reach the knocker and rap once; if this was not answered, she gave what is called a 'postman's knock'; and if this was not responded to, "tried a scientific rat-tat that would not disgrace a West End footman." It is added that she held the knocker in her paws as we would hold it in our fingers, and did not simply tip it up. Mr. J. J. Cole's cat, of Maryland, Sutton, Surrey, having observed that a servant went to one of the windows after hearing the flap of a letter-box attached to it moved by a postman, learned to have herself let in when shut out by also rattling the flap. Some alarm was excited at Mr. Lonergan's house in London by a mysterious knocking at a door which could not be reached from the outside except by climbing over a wall. At length, Mrs. Muffins, the cat, was detected as the author of the sounds, and it was found some time afterward that she had learned to produce them by pulling at the loose lower end of a strip of board running down at the side of the door, and allowing it to rebound. There is perhaps nothing very remarkable in an animal, having observed that the striking of the knocker or the pulling of the bell-knob was usually followed by the opening of the door, learning to imitate the act. But some cats have gone further than this, and have learned the connection between the wire and the bell, and to avail themselves of it in order to be let in.

Other acts are related of cats that give us a much higher conception of their mental powers, and even go a little way toward lifting them into the order of beings capable of real abstract reasoning. Kitty, of Belfast, Maine, having given a mouse to her kittens to play with, watched the sport for a while as if to see that the mouse did not escape, but at last bit it so as to disable it, and then went away. Two kittens, neighbors of Kitty's,