7 DECEMBER 1867, Page 11

" REPRESENTATIVE " CATS.

THE special friends of the Cat have been somewhat outraged in feeling by the remarks which we made on the qualities accounting for her imperfect civilization in our last number. We print elsewhere an amusing and able letter from a corre- spondent, the only fault of whose criticism in an intellectual point -of view is that it is too much of the nature of an apologia pro feli suo,—of a panegyric on that valuable and evidently truly intelligent individual member of the race there commemorated. In an inquiry of this sort it is especially necessary to guard against allowing too much weight to individual feline personality. Cats mistakenly sup- posed to be representative, may no doubt be found, just as Emerson has enumerated certain representative men, who will impersonate in -a very distinguished degree each of those qualities which are scat- tered faintly over the race,—cats who will elaborate the common properties of the species into burning and shining characteristics, -almost touching the lower limit of the race of dogs. In such a -series of miscalled representative cats, no doubt Sandy, elsewhere -described, may possibly deserve a place, —say, as "Cat of the World," for example ; while we, even while we were writing last week, had in our memory specimens of more or less remarkable ex- amples of 'the Cat of the House-Top," and "the Cat of Leisure." ." There is, however," as Mr. Emerson remarks of great men, 4‘ a speedy limit to the use of heroes,"—and there is a speedier limit in the case of cats (which have, we fear, no element of indefinite progress, if of progress at all, in them), than even in the case of men. The truth is, that the distinguished eats of the world are not really representative. They mark only the highest points which the half-domesticated and unprogressive Cat of Europe has touched on different sides. There is a certain deceptiveness and illusion about the stories of illustrious cats, which even surpasses the illusion about the stories of illustrious dogs or illustrious men. In a progressive race, you may consider the high- tide marks of to-day as likely to be the low-tide marks of a future generation. At least this is necessarily true of intellectual powers. As Emerson remarks, "Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus; every novel is a debtor to Homer ; every carpenter who shaves with a fore-plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor ;" and so we may fairly say, in a less exalted sense, that every retriever which brings back the wild duck or the partridge to its master, borrows the genius of some forgotten ancestor, and every sheep dog which collects the flock and brings in the missing lambs is a debtor to some far-off Collie. But the highest points touched by eminent cats are not in this way starting- points for the transmission of an accumulating experience. And this is the defect of the sterile anecdotic literature in which the lovers of cats are too apt to indulge. Their stories are very curious and in- teresting, as showing the exceptional developments of feline faculty ; but still we must not disguise from ourselves that they do not repre- sent the permanent nature and character of the species, so much as the abnormal and peculiar acuteness of feline individualities which are never likely to represent anything permanent in the race. Here, for instance, is a work before us, called the Book of Cats,* which magnifies the truly typical cat, by narrating all the stories of historic cats which have surpassed their race in acuteness,— and very amusing anecdotes many of them are, — and then coolly draws the inference that cats are very nearly if not quite equal to dogs in originality and intelligence, and that the natura- list's principle that dogs are attached chiefly to the person, eats to the locality, is an idle prejudice, because in some hundred cases or so cats have shown quite as much attachment to persons as to places. If we were to reason in like manner, we could prove, doubtless, by more than a hundred (exceptional) instances, that dogs are more-attached to the locality than to the person, or that cats prefer swimming and diving to hunting on dry land, or any other paradox. The anecdotist should always put clearly before himself what is the object of his story,—to give representative anecdotes illustrative of the character of the type, or, on the other hand, to show the abnormal height reached by certain speci- mens of the species under particularly favourable conditions. When Mr. Rosa tells us, for example, that the celebrated Sam Slick's cat, wishing to get into the library where he found the most comfortable quarters, used to jump at the library bell, and then enter with the servant who answered it,—he tells a really instructive story of the excess of ingenuity which the only power- ful civilizing force that affects the whole feline family,—the love of comfort,—will sometimes elaborate in remarkable individuals. The same may be said of the story of the monastery cat who dis- covered that when a certain bell rang, the cook left the kitchen to answer it, leaving the monks' dinners portioned out in plates un- protected, and who accordingly systematically rang this bell just before dinner time, and then ran off with one of the portions, escaping by the window by which she had entered. Here, again, we have the single great civilizing influence which acts upon the type pushed into an unusually inventive excellence,—and the story is instructive less for the extreme and exceptional ingenuity of the feline understanding which suggested these artifices, than as show- ing the broad common felinity of the principle by which the device was prompted. But when we are told, as the writer of these lines was by his own brother, that a cat, living some thirty years ago in the New Road, where the garden gates were at that time unfurnished with bells and sometimes not easily opened, watched a stranger struggling for many minutes with the lock of the gate, and then deliberately pressed with its paw on the horizontal lever of the bell handle which used to be on the low wall at the bottom of the door steps some yards from the gate, and summoned a servant to his help,—we may accept the story with the respect due to the testimony on which it rests, but we entirely decline to regard it as in any respect affording a true light on the feline type of mind, in which benevolence to strangers is not a marked characteristic.

Now, keeping this distinction in view, we feel no doubt that we were, on the whole, accurate in our delineation of the qualities of representative cats, properly so-called,—not, mind, feline heroes or heroines,—not cats such as show some extraordinary quality not proper to the type, and not to be found in one cat in a thousand,—but true specimens of the domestic cat of Europe, as she appears when treated with that respectful cordiality that is likely to bring out all her normal qualities to their highest perfection. In this sense, we maintain most confidently that the civilizing influence which acts upon the mind of the cat is not the new knowledge she gains from her proximity to man, nor directly even her love for human society, but her love of that comfort in which the protection of man secures her. Here we have on our side the great authority of Mr. Galion, one of the greatest of our naturalists, who in a most interesting paper in that volume of the records of the Ethnological Society published in 1865, discusses the chief conditions of the domestication of animals, and decides that the one which chiefly applies to the eat

• The Book of Cats. By Charles EL Boss. London: Griffith and Ferran is her love of comfort. "The cat," he says, "is the only non- gruarious domestic animal,"—he has shown that in general gre- gariousness is a condition of effectual domestication,—" it is retained by its extraordinary adhesion to the comforts of the house in which it is reared." And we hold that the reason why cats are capable of no higher civilization is, that this, which is peculiarly their condition of domestication, is one of much less promise, and containing much fewer elements of progress, than that which chiefly influences the civilization of the dog. Mr. Galton's second condition, is "they should have an inborn liking for man." Now, this liking in cats,—in ordinary cats, typical cats,—is less direct than derivative. Cats love the lap and the hearth, and the cushioned chair, and the bed, because all these are comfortable places,—but it is certainly not typical of the cat, as it is of the dog, to prefer a cold and comfortless room where a human friend is, to a warm and comfortable one where it is alone. That cats are capable of personal attachments is certain. But their attachments are feeble and interested compared with the attachments of species whose civilization is due to an inborn love of man, rather than an inborn love of comfort. The cat, com- memorated both by Mr. Ross and our correspondent "S. D. C.," who sprang at the man who was maltreating her mistress, may very possibly not be a myth. But she was not a representative cat, rather a decidedly uurepresentive cat. On the contrary, the like action in a dog would have been thoroughly representative of the species, and expresses one of the characteristics on which its great intelligence is founded. Personal love of this kind necessarily issues in intelligence of a much higher sort than even that of the two bell-ringing cats, which aimed at getting admission respec- tively to a good fire and a good dinner ; for there the motive only led to the study of the "antecedent phenomena," as the Positivists would say, of the mechanical conditions desired ; but the love of man leads to a study of the various situations likely to endanger him, and the dog accordingly shows a surprising ingenuity in warning his master against dangers he would often never suspect, and even in detecting the signs of evil purpose in any stranger whom he may see in the neighbourhood of his master's person or property. Thus, disinterested love of persons leads to something even of spiritual intelligence, the diagnosis of character, the apergu of malignant aims,—aud the cat only shows this so far as she shares the purely disinterested love of the dog for man, which is in a very infinitesimal degree in the majority of cases. So, again, when we said that the cat shows little or no keen interest in human affairs, little intelligent curiosity as to the designs and scope of human actions, we did not mean to imply that she is destitute of interest in the changes which may be made in the furniture of a room. No animal has a better inventory in her brain of all the various sensations which the different objects in a house are capable of giving her than the cat, but very little of this is due to an intelligent curiosity directed to human affairs. Sandy's profound emotion at the departure of her mistress is, of course, a trait of a higher kind, and we have known many cats who betrayed the same feeling. Mr. Ross tells a story of a cat which pined away on its mistress's death, and even died on her grave,—a story common enough in the case of dogs, but very exceptional in the case of cats. This, like the story of the cat which spontaneously became the London visitor's cat's-paw for ringing the bell, is interesting, as show- ing the limits of exceptional excellence which eminent cats have reached, but has really very little bearing on the causes which have led to the semi-civilization of the cat,—causes which have shown themselves essentially insufficient to ensure for the cat what we may call a progressive and cumulative civilization. The cats are, indeed, the Orientals of domesticated animals. They are influenced by custom rather than competition, for which last they have not usually the energy or spirits. Like Orientals, too, they are excessively conservative, and once comfortable, regard all change as intrinsically evil.

Not that we wish to limit the study of "the individuality of the individual" in cats. We are well aware of the great variety in their manners. There is the sedate and polite cat, who receives you with all the ceremony of a Mandarin, and the rough, abrupt cat, who would sooner sit in the fire than in anybody's lap. There are the cats which may be called "the scourges of the shrubbery," and the cats which are "the darlings of the human race." All these may be truly repre- sentative cats, for each of them may be working out its own private notion of comfort, and of the greater or less advantages it at- tributes to human society and protection, in its own narrower or wider way. But let us steadily distinguish between qualities that are truly representative of the cat, and exceptional qualities

which carry you in imagination across that immense gulf which separates universal felinity from universal =Unity. There are cats, we do not deny,—sporadic cats,—every now and then to be found on the other side of the border, just as there are men who are more saints than men. We may apply what Emerson finely says, in his catholic way, of remarkable men who embody great human qualities to cats, and say, "I applaud a sufficient cat," whatever special phase its manners may assume. But when we are discussing what is the great motive power in feline civilization, we are compelled to answer, that it is not direct love of man, but indirect love of him, through the comforts he supplies. Any answer more gratifying to the vanity of cats would be untrue both to the observed extent of such civilization as they have, and to the limits which that civilization is scarcely ever known to transcend.