Cat’s-eye or Sun-stone of the Turks is a kind of gem found chiefly in Siberia. It is very hard and semi-transparent, and has different points from whence the light is reflected with a kind of yellowish radiation somewhat similar to the eyes of cats.

Catkins are imperfect flowers hanging from trees in the manner of a rope or cat’s-tail.

Cat’s-meat, Cat-thyme, and Cat’s-foot are the names of herbs; Cat’s-head of an apple, and also of a kind of fossil. Cat-silver is a fossil. Cat’s-tail is a seed or a long round substance growing on a nut-tree.

A Cat-fish is a shark in the West Indies. Guanahani, or Cat Island, a small island of the Bahama group, in the West Indies, is supposed to be so called because wild Cats of large size used to infest it, but I can find no particulars upon the subject in the works of writers on the West Indies.

In the North of England, a common expression of contempt is to call a person Cat-faced. Artists call portraits containing two-thirds of the figure Kit-cat size. With little boys in the street a Cat is a dreadfully objectionable plaything, roughly cut out of a stick or piece of wood, and sharpened at each end. Those whose way to business lies through low neighbourhoods, and who venture upon short cuts, well know from bitter experience that at a certain period of the year the tip-cat season sets in with awful severity, and then it is not safe for such as have eyes to lose, to wander where the epidemic rages.

TIP-CAT.
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In the North, however, the same game is called “Piggie.” I learn by the newspaper that a young woman at Leeds nearly lost her eye-sight by a blow from one of these piggies or cats, and the magistrates sent the boy who was the cause of it to an industrial school, ordering his father to pay half-a-crown a week for his maintenance.

The shrill whistle indulged in upon the first night of a pantomime by those young gentlemen with the figure six curls in the front row of the gallery are denominated cat-calls. This is, I am given to understand, a difficult art to acquire—I know I have tried very hard myself and can’t; and to arrive at perfection you must lose a front tooth. Such a thing has been known before this, as a young costermonger having one of his front teeth pulled out to enable him to whistle well. Let us hope that his talent was properly appreciated in the circles in which he moved.

With respect to cat-calls or cat-cals, also termed cat-pipes, it would appear that there was an instrument by that name used by the audiences at the theatre, the noise of which was very different to that made by whistling through the fingers, as now practised. In the Covent Garden Journal for 1810 the O. P. Riots are thus spoken of:—“Mr. Kemble made his appearance in the costume of ‘Macbeth,’ and, amid vollies of hissing, hooting, groans, and cat-calls, seemed as though he meant to speak a steril and pointless address announced for the occasion.”