old Greek word ἀιλος, flatterer, with the Æolic digamma Fαιλὸς, from which the Latins formed the word Felis; from ἄιλὸς comes ἄιλερος, flattering with the tail. This etymology seems to me false; it is not founded upon the manners of the animal, which is by no means addicted to caressing or flattery. It would apply better to the dog, which is both, and which employs its tail to express these sentiments.

Suidas * adds to the common names of the cat, ἄιλερος and γαλῆ, those of κέρδω and ιλαρια, which seem to be two epithets, the cunning and the gay, and are derived from the manners of the animal. Kuster corrects, erroneously in my opinion, ίλαρια into ἄιλουρος, for the first of these names is given to the cat by Artemidorus, and the playfulness of young cats has become proverbial.

The word Catus, with the signification of cat †, first occurs in Palladius; but the adjective Catus, which signifies sharp or piercing, is employed by Ennius: Cata signa sonitum voce dare parabant. Varro, who quotes it, considers it as a word of the Sabine language. At a later period, the word took the acceptation of solers, callidus, acutus, as Cicero informs ust. The word Catus or cat, from which the Greeks of the Lower Empire took their word Καττος §, and the Arabians their name cat, unless this word be derived from a more ancient source, is therefore taken either from the sharp cry, or insidious, prudent and wary character of the animal, like the ἀιλὸς of the Greeks and the felis of the Latins.

I am ignorant of the roots or etymology of the names hir, dsaiwan, ginda, chittal, and dim, which the Arabians have given to the cat; but the very variety of these names seems to indicate that the animal was either common in the country, or long domesticated there.

I now pursue the description of the manners and organization of the cat, known among the Greeks from the time of Herodotus under the name of άιλερος.

Ælian accurately describes several of the habits and manners of the cat, which he calls ἄιλαρος. " The male," he says, "is very lascivious; the female a very tender mother. It flees the approach of the male, for the seed of the latter is said to be very hot, and to burn the genital parts of the female like fire. It is for this reason that the male kills the young immediately after they are brought forth, for the desire of having other young ones forces the female to submit to the desires of the male. It is said that cats abhor all kinds of bad smell, and it is for this reason that they dig the earth to bury their excrements in it."

This description of Ælian, like many others of the ancients, contains facts accurately observed, and a false explanation of these facts.

The female cat does not flee from the male for the reason assigned; but she avoids him, dreads him, and suffers from him, because the glans of his penis is covered with very sharp horny papillæ. This is the cause of the piercing cries of the female during copulation.

It is neither from cleanliness nor from the dislike of bad smells that cats bury their excrements, but from an instinct of distrust resulting from their wild state, which rebels against the feeling of domestication, because the strong smell which their excrements emit might reveal their retreat, the abode and asylum of their young, which are to remain concealed.

A trace of this habit, and of the distrust from which it springs, common to the wolf and other wild animals, still appears in the dog, which, although much more completely domesticated than the cat, throws up a little earth upon its excrements.

If the date of the fables attributed to Æsop might be referred to the period at which that fabulist lived, it would be certain that the cat was known at a very ancient epoch in Greece and Asia Minor. Its domesticity, its manners, its character, and the circumstance of its being employed in houses to destroy rats and mice, are described in four of these fables, in which the name of άιλερος is given to it.

The fable of the cat in ambush, which, to get at the rats, pretended to be dead, and got itself powdered with meal, ought,

in my opinion, to be applied to the cat, and not to a species of Mustela, although Phædrus * has, on this occasion, translated the word αιλερος by that of Mustela.

La Fontaine, indeed, who has translated Æsop, makes a true cat the hero of his apologue, and it is a somewhat remarkable thing that the French poet should have better determined the sense of the Greek word and the kind of animal than the Latin translator.

The other fable of Æsop's, in which an officious ἄιλερος, at a time when the poultry-yard was attacked by an epidemic disease, disguises itself as a physician, and goes to offer its services with the design of devouring them, paints in a very natural manner the perfidious manners and treachery of the cat, and at the same time proves, in opposition to the assertion of the naturalists above mentioned, that the animal in question must have been subjected for some time to domestication before its tricks, its habits, and its character, could have been observed.

Now, if I have proved that the cat was known in Egypt, China, India, Judæa, and Chaldea, at the most remote period, it becomes probable that Greece and Asia also possessed that animal; but they then imposed upon it another name γαλῆ, a generic name which they, in like manner, gave to several species of Mustela and to a Viverra. It is my object now to unravel the confusion caused by this homonomy, to distinguish in the descriptions of the ancients the different species of γαλῆ or Mustelæ, to recognize the cat under all these names by the characteristic traits which are peculiar to it; and I trust, if some attention be lent to me, I shall succeed in solving the riddle.

When agriculture and civilization advanced, and men became sensible of the inconveniencies resulting from the too great multiplication of a species, they would naturally devise means of destroying it, and guarding themselves against its attacks.

Rats, mice, and other glires of a like nature, appear from the earliest times of history, and even of fable. Poisons, traps, and machines adapted for destroying these noxious animals were not yet invented, and there were then more forests, copses, and retreats for them than now. Man would naturally employ ani

mals for enabling him to get rid of this pest. How should he not have sought to taine the cat, which is their cruelest enemy, and which could not fail to be the most powerful auxiliary of man in this active, perpetual, and daily warfare?

The mythological traditions * which relate, that, during the war of Typhon, the gods fled into Egypt, and metamorphosed themselves into various animals; Apollo into a hawk, Diana into a cat, Latona into a mouse, confirm the antiquity of the existence of the cat and of glires in Egypt and Greece.

But, as I have said, the cat at this period bore the name of γαλῆ. This is the opinion of Henri Etienne † and Coray, who, nevertheless, err in applying it only to the weazel and cat, while it also designates generically various species of canivorous animals of the genus Mustela, tamed by the ancients and associated by them with the cat in the destruction of glires.

We have seen that Herodotus, Aristotle, Ælian, Diodorus, and the fables of Æsop give the name άιλερος to the cat, whether wild or tame. At a later period, when the Latin name catus, καττος, prevailed among the Greeks, as designative of the domestic cat, the name άιλερος was applied to the wild cat. At a little later period, the domestic cat resumed the name of γαλῆ, which had been its original name at the commencement of lite

rature.

The word γαλεῆ, which occurs three times in the Batrachomyomachia must, in my opinion, have been applied to the cat, and even to the domestic cat. This is also the opinion of Henri Etienne and Barnes §, who have been combated by Perizonius ||, Perotto, Philonenus Conradus and Lycius.

The synonymy of the words γαλέη and άιλερος, and the designation of the cat by Homer under the name of γαλέη, will be fixed by comparing a verse of Callimachus with another of the Batrachomyomachia, of which the former is an imitation, or to which it evidently alludes.

Erysiehton, in his horrible hunger, devoured his mules, oxen, horses, κὰι τῶν ἀιλερον, τῶν ἔτριμε θηρία μικρα, the cat dreaded by small animals, in short, all that was in Triopas's house."

We also find under the name of γαλέη, in a proverb cited by Theocritus, the cat, which his cotemporary Callimachus calls ἄιλερος. The common saying, αι γαλέαι μαλακως χρήζονται κατεύθην, cats like to sleep on soft beds, retraces one of the habits of the cat most frequently observed. It seeks soft beds, pillows, and

couches *.

Some learned men have applied this proverb to the weasel, but it does not paint the habits of that wild species which lives in the bushes, thorns, and heaps of fire-wood, and whose nests, which I have several times found, are in trunks of trees, and formed of straws, hay, or hard and dry plants. Buffon's experiment of the weaselt, which, being shut up in a cage with some cotton, squatted whenever one went near it, does not prove that that species naturally seeks a soft bed, like the cat, but is accounted for by the distrust innate in these feeble carnivorous animals, which leads them to conceal themselves and seek shelter, whenever they see the approach of an enemy stronger than themselves.

Observations connected with the Migration of the Herring and Mackerel, as noticed in the British Channel. By Major W. M. MORRISON. Communicated by the Author.

HASTINGS, from its peculiar situation, is well suited for a fishing station, and has, in consequence, for a considerable period, employed many vessels in this particular branch of commerce. Each vessel is furnished with from one hundred to one hundred and twenty nets, each net being forty feet in length. They can be joined to each other with great facility; and, when in the sea, present a curtain from fourteen to sixteen feet in depth. These the fishermen, when at any distance from the land, always shoot or place north and south, or as near that direction as can be done conveniently, in order that they may drift with the flowing and ebbing of the tide, which takes the

* Dict. d'Hist. Nat. viii. 208. JULY-OCTOBER 1829.

+ Hist. Nat. Anim. art. Belette,

Y