In Praise of the Cat
GREAT is Diana of the Ephesians ! " What 1.-A better name than " Diana " can you imagine— if you think that " Isis " sounds somewhat ugly—for a favourite cat, when you consider that this creature was by the ancient and enlightened hierarchy of Egypt, and in that country's Golden Age, chosen to receive honours as a representation of the moon ? Always in Egyptian temples the image of the cat was to be seen.
Even in the present day the Moslems in Egypt show particular kindness to this creature. It was a Sultan, EI-Daher-Beybars, who in the thirteenth century set the fashion, not seldom followed in this humaner age, of making a bequest to support his feline friends. Himself a man renowned alike for his courage and his ferocity, he was seldom to be seen in his lifetime without one of them in his company, and his palace, which swarmed with them, might have been taken for a cattery. Indeed, it is not so many years ago that in Cairo his legatees ceased to be fed regularly every afternoon in the outer court of the Mehkemeh.
If what Mapes once wrote (in a vein of satire upon the doctrine of Purgatory) be true of beasts in general :- " 0 felix conditio pecorum brutorum !
Cadunt cum corporibus Spiritus eorum "
—for the cat at least tradition demands an exception. For in Egypt you may find cat mummies without number in wood coffins : for each of them there was once the celebration of solemn funeral rites, and for each of them one or more of the Egyptians had once gone with shaven eyebrows for a sign of mourning.
Neither in Egypt only was puss worshipped ; for the Cultua was carried over into Greece._ Galinthias was eat-goddess in Boeotia. In Scandinavia, Freya's car was ilia*n by a pair of cats.' In the mural paintings of the -Etruscans and the early R omans the cat is seen frequently, and in the old tales of the Germans and the magic ritual of the Laplanders it figures largely. Half the countries of Europe have each their version of " Puss in Boots," of " Dick Whittington," and " The White Cat." In Persia and China such stories abound. As to the New World of the West, in the year 1902, in Mirth Yukon, cats were sold at five pounds each. Thii was when there was a plague of rats and mice.
The apotheosis of the cat is no mere stupid fancy on the part of superstitious folk. For leaving aside those fevi extravagances that have gathered round it, such as that custom of the Japanese of cutting off the long tails of their kittens, for fear that the cat that has a long tail will become a goblin in old age and drag the bed-clothes off while people sleep, and make weird lights dance on the floor or on the roofs at night, or those ignorant ideas, which once made French sorcerers treat skin complaints with three drops of blood front the vein under a cat's tail—leaving aside, I say, these and similar absurdities, puss on the whole has justified her distinction.
As a clairvoyant the cat has the remarkable faculty for scenting ghosts and for prognosticating death. It has been known to show signs of uneasiness a little time before a death has happened in the house, to shiver, to sniff, to be unable to settle anywhere, to mew plaintively and to shrink from being left alone in the dark. Cats have been noticed to shrink from persons who have afterwards gone raving mad.
Perhaps the strangest instance of this psychic faculty is one reported by the Globe in the winter of 1901. The two ships ' Salmon ' and ' Sturgeon' were lying alongside, and on the former were two cats, special pets of the crew, which had never shown the least desire to desert their vessel. But one particular morning, when it was about to sail, these two made every effort to leave the ' Salmon ' and to board the ' Sturgeon.' They were chased by the crew and harried by the dog, all to no purpose ; for just as the ' Salmon ' had weighed anchor, and the vessels swung apart, the cats made one last spring together and landed on the ' Sturgeon's ' deck. The ' Salmon ' was involved in a disastrous collision on the day following.
No wonder that in ancient Egypt one felt safe so long as a cat was in the house ! In every temple, too, which was dedicated to the sun the effigy of this animal was prominent. A love of warmth is perhaps not the only reason why the cat revels in sunlight : it may also be because the sun is such a potent agent in keeping off those terrifying influences of the supra-physical sphere to which the cat is so especially sensitive.
As a detective, the cat has distinguished itself not seldom in a very practical way. It was a cat which. after two months of fruitless search on the part of Government detectives in 1920, was responsible for the arrest of nineteen young men and the recovery of £70,000 worth of stolen German dyes belonging to the Hoboken Chemical Company in New York. A friendly tabby this, it approached a member of the Government staff as he was standing in the Hoboken docks (piecing together the meagre clues he had) and rubbed itself affectionately against his legs. He was startled on looking down to see some stains of orange hue and hastening to the Government analyst found that here was a dye identical with what he sought. It was not long before a police van drove up to the tabby's lair, which was the cellar of a house supposed to be empty : the nineteen thieves were captured and the valuable dyes recovered within the next two hours.
Sometimes I feel that with all the honours of divinity Gray's Selima is typical of cats all over the wide world —the favourite who has no friend. My own litany at any rate is a simple one : in the familiar words of Swinburne, I make my petition :- "Stately, kindly, lordly friend, Condescend
Here to sit by me."
With all its sacrosanct prerogatives, all its long noble history, I am concerned to maintain companionship with this soft patient creature of God, which even the stinting Shylock was content to call "'the harmless
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