The newspapers have recently been chronicling, as a fact provocative
of especial wonder, the enterprise of some speculative merchant of
New York, who has just been despatching a cargo of one hundred cats
to the republic of New Granada, in which it would appear the race,
owing, as we may believe, to the frequently disturbed state of the
country, has become almost extinct.
Your cat is a domestic animal, and naturally conservative in its
tastes--averse therefore to uproar, and to all those given to
change. Its propensities are to meditation and contemplative
tranquillity, for which reason it has ever been held in reverence by
nations of a similar staid and composed disposition, and has been
the favourite companion and constant friend of grave philosophers
and thoughtful students. By the ancient Egyptians cats were held in
the highest esteem; and we learn from Diodorus Siculus, their 'lives
and safeties' were tendered more dearly than those of any other
animal, whether biped or quadruped. 'He who has voluntarily killed a
consecrated animal,' says this writer, 'is punished with death; but
if any one has even involuntarily killed a cat or an ibis, it is
impossible for him to escape death: the mob drags him to it,
treating him with every cruelty, and sometimes without waiting for
judgment to be passed. This treatment inspires such terror, that, if
any person happen to find one of these animals dead, he goes to a
distance from it, and by his cries and groans indicates that he has
found the animal dead. This superstition is so deeply rooted in the
minds of the Egyptians, and the respect they bear these animals is
so profound, that at the time when their king, Ptolemy, was not yet
declared the friend of the Roman people--when they were paying all
possible court to travellers from Italy, and their fears made them
avoid every ground of accusation and every pretext for making war
upon them--yet a Roman having killed a cat, the people rushed to his
house, and neither the entreaties of the grandees, whom the king
sent for the purpose, nor the terror of the Roman name, could
protect this man from punishment, although the act was involuntary.
I do not relate this anecdote,' adds the historian, 'on the
authority of another, for I was an eye-witness of it during my stay
in Egypt.'[5]
During their lives, the consecrated cats were fed upon fish, kept
for the purpose in tanks; and 'when one of them happened to die,'
says the veracious writer just cited, 'it was wrapped in linen, and
after the bystanders had beaten themselves on the breast, it was
carried to the Tarichoea, where it was embalmed with coedria and
other substances which have the virtue of embalming bodies, after
which it was interred in the sacred monument.' It has puzzled not a
little the learned archæologists, who have endeavoured to discover a
profound philosophy figured and symbolised in the singular mythology
of the Egyptians, to explain how it is that in Thebes, where the
sacred character of the cat was held in the highest reverence, and
cherished with the greatest devotion, not only embalmed cats have
been found, but also the bodies of rats and mice, which had been
subjected to the same anti-putrescent process. If, however,
Herodotus is to be credited, the Egyptians owed a deep debt of
gratitude to the mice; for the venerable historian assures us, and
on the unquestionable authority of the Egyptian priests, that when
Sennacherib and his army lay at Pelusium, a mighty corps of
field-mice entered the camp by night, and eating up the quivers,
bowstrings, and buckler-leathers of the Assyrian troops, in this
summary fashion liberated Egypt from the terror of the threatened
invasion. Probably the existence of mice-mummies may be accounted
for in this way, and if--resorting to no violent supposition--we
presume in the good work which the tiny patriots so sagaciously
accomplished that their cousins-german the rats were assistant, the
whole matter receives a satisfactory explication. The hypothesis, it
is submitted, is not without plausible recommendations on its
behalf. There is extant a fragment of a comedy, entitled 'The
Cities,' written by the Rhodian poet Anaxandrides, in which the
Egyptian worship of animals is amusingly enough quizzed. A
translation will be found in Dr Prichard's _Analysis of Egyptian
Mythology_. The lines referring to cat-worship are as follow:--
'You cry and wail whene'er ye spy a cat,
Starving or sick; I count it not a sin
To hang it up, and flay it for its skin;'
from which it appears this gay free-thinker was not only somewhat
sceptical in his religious notions, but, moreover, a hard-hearted,
good-for-nothing fellow--one who, had he lived in our times, would
unquestionably have brought himself within the sweep of the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and the Duke of Beaufort's
Humanity Act.
We learn from Herodotus that in his days it was customary, whenever
a cat died, for the whole household at once to go into mourning, and
this although the lamented decease might have been the result of old
age, or other causes purely natural. In the case of a cat's death,
however, the eyebrows only were required to be shaved off; but when
a dog, a beast of more distinguished reputation, departed this life,
every inmate of the house was expected to shave his head and whole
body all over. Both cats and dogs are watched and attended to with
the greatest solicitude during illness. Indeed, by the ancient
Egyptians the cat was treated much in the same way as are dogs
amongst us: we find them even accompanying their masters on their
aquatic shooting-excursions; and, if the testimony of ancient
monuments is to be relied on, often catching the game for them,
although it may be permitted to doubt whether they ever actually
took to the water for this purpose.
In modern Egypt the cat, although more docile and companionable than
its European sister, has much degenerated; but still, on account of
its usefulness in destroying scorpions and other reptiles, it is
treated with some consideration--suffered to eat out of the same
dish with the children, to join with them in their sports, and to be
their constant companion and daily friend. A modern Egyptian would
esteem it a heinous sin indeed, to destroy, or even maltreat a cat;
and we are told by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, that benevolent
individuals have bequeathed funds by which a certain number of these
animals are daily fed at Cairo at the Cadi's court, and the bazaar
of Khan Khaleel.
But a tender regard for the inferior animals is a prevailing
characteristic of the Oriental races, and is inculcated as a duty by
their various religions. At Fez there was, and perhaps is at this
day, a wealthily-endowed hospital, the greater part of the funds of
which was devoted to the support and medical treatment of invalid
cranes and storks, and procuring them a decent sepulture whenever
they chanced to die. The founders are said to have entertained the
poetical notion that these birds are, in truth, human beings,
natives of distant islands, who at certain periods assume a foreign
shape, and after they have satisfied their curiosity with visiting
other lands, return to their own, and resume their original form.
To return, however, not to our sheep, but our cats, we must remark
that, in modern times, in spite of the kindness the cat habitually
receives in Egypt, his _morale_ is not in that country rated very
high--the universal impression being that, although, like Snug the
joiner's lion, he is by nature 'a very gentle beast,' still he is by
no means 'of a good conscience;' that he is, in short, a most
ungrateful beast; and that when, in a future state, it is asked of
him how he has been treated by man in this, he will obstinately deny
all the benefits he has received at his hand, and give him such a
character for cruelty and hardness of heart as is shocking to think
of. The dog, however, it is understood, will conduct himself more
discreetly, and readily acknowledge the good offices for which he is
indebted to the family of mankind.
Singular anecdotes have been related of the intense repugnance
persons have been found to entertain to these, at worst, harmless
animals. One shall be given in the very words of the Rev. Nicholas
Wanley, who, in his authentic _Wonders of the Little World_, has
recorded a number of other facts quite as marvellous, and sustained
by testimony not one whit more exceptionable:--'Mathiolus tells of a
German, who coming in winter-time into an inn to sup with him and
some other of his friends, the woman of the house being acquainted
with his temper (lest he should depart at the sight of a young cat
which she kept to breed up), had beforehand hid her kitling in a
chest in the same room where we sat at supper. But though he had
neither seen nor heard it, yet after some time that he had sucked in
the air infected by the cat's breath, that quality of his
temperament that had antipathy to that creature being provoked, he
sweat, and, of a sudden, paleness came over his face, and, to the
wonder of us all that were present, he cried out that in some corner
of the room there was a cat that lay hid.' Not long after the battle
of Wagram and the second occupation of Vienna by the French, an
aide-de-camp of Napoleon, who at the time occupied, together with
his suite, the Palace of Schönbrunn, was proceeding to bed at an
unusually late hour, when, on passing the door of Napoleon's
bedroom, he was surprised by a most singular noise, and repeated
calls from the Emperor for assistance. Opening the door hastily, and
rushing into the room, a singular spectacle presented itself--the
great soldier of the age, half undressed, his countenance agitated,
the beaded drops of perspiration standing on his brow, in his hand
his victorious sword, with which he was making frequent and
convulsive lunges at some invisible enemy through the tapestry that
lined the walls. It was a cat that had secreted herself in this
place; and Napoleon held cats not so much in abhorrence as in
terror. 'A feather,' says the poet, 'daunts the brave;' and a
greater poet, through the mouth of his Shylock, remarks that 'there
are some that are mad if they behold a cat--a harmless, necessary
cat.' Count Bertram would seem to have shared in this unaccountable
aversion. When 'Monsieur Parolles, the gallant militarist, that had
the whole theory of war in the knot of his scarf, and the practice
in the chape of his dagger,' was convicted of mendacity and
cowardice, Bertram exclaimed, 'I could endure anything before this
but a cat, and now he's a cat to me.' The force of censure could no
further go.
If Napoleon, however, held cats, as has been averred, in positive
fear, there have been others, and some of them illustrious captains,
that have regarded them with other feelings. Marshal Turenne could
amuse himself for hours in playing with his kittens; and the great
general, Lord Heathfield, would often appear on the walls of
Gibraltar, at the time of the famous siege, attended by his
favourite cats. Cardinal Richelieu was also fond of cats; and when
we have enumerated the names of Cowper and Dr Johnson, of Thomas
Gray and Isaac Newton, and, above all, of the tender-hearted and
meditative Montaigne, the list is far from complete of those who
have bestowed on the feline race some portion of their affections.