Page:Scientific Monthly, volume 14.djvu/533



O animal has been so highly extolled on the one hand as a paragon of virtue, and on the other so roundly condemned as an unmitigated nuisance as the domestic cat, which has been associated with man for upwards of three thousand years. Southey once declared that no home was complete unless it had "in it a child rising six years and a kitten rising six months." Friends of the cat never tire of lauding its domesticity, its neatness, its useful services as a destroyer of rodents, the natural grace and beauty of its movements, its affection and even its surpassing intelligence; while its detractors denounce it as an independent, unsocial ingrate, attached to the hearth for the comfort it affords, but seldom wasting any affection on the person who lays the fire or supplies it with food, as incapable of any unselfish devotion and service, a carrier of vermin and disease, and the most cruel and remorseless enemy of bird-life everywhere.

Viewed impartially the cat is a carnivorous animal of rather moderate intelligence; courageous and resourceful when put to the test, it only follows at all times the bent of its strongest instincts; like every feline it has keen tactual, visual and auditory senses, but its nose is small and rather weak; its endurance in relation to its bodily strength is phenomenal, and we can not but admire its marvellous powers of muscular coordination and control; fecund, and endowed with a vitality which in the popular mind extends far beyond life's usual limits, the cat is unsurpassed as mother and nurse, and in this field her instinct is never-failing.

In his excellent economic study of the cat, Forbush reminds us that while partly tamed this animal has not been fully domesticated: "It has not been subdued, confined or controlled, except in rare cases, but is to all intents and purposes a wild animal. In most cases it stays in the home of man, mainly because of the warmth of his fire, the food that it eats and its affection for the location where it was reared. If, by accident or design, anything