All fancy colours to be shown in the "any other variety of colour" class, and judged according to quality of coat, beauty, and rarity of colouring or marking. The small, thin, broken-banded tabby should go in this class, as also those with thin, light, wavy lines.
All foreign, wild, or other cats of peculiar form to go into the class for "any other variety or species."
"SYLVIE."
DISEASES OF CATS.
Cats, like many other animals, both wild and domestic, are subject to diseases, several being fatal, others yielding to known curatives; many are of a very exhaustive character, some are epidemic, others are undoubtedly contagious—the two worst of these are what is known as the distemper and the mange. Through the kindness of friends I am enabled to give recipes for medicines considered as useful, or, at any rate, tending to abate the severity of the attack in the one, and utterly eradicate the other. Care should always be taken on the first symptoms of illness to remove the animal at once from contact with others. My kind friend, Dr. George Fleming, C.B., principal veterinary surgeon of the army, has courteously sent me a copy of a remedy for cat distemper from his very excellent work, "Animal Plagues: their History, Nature, and Prevention," which I give in full.
CATARRHAL FEVERS.
"Cats are, like some other of the domesticated animals, liable to be attacked by two kinds of Catarrhal Fever, one of which is undoubtedly very infectious—like distemper in dogs—and the other may be looked upon as the result of a simple cold, and therefore not transmissible. The first is, of course, the most severe and fatal, and often prevails most extensively, affecting cats generally over wide areas, sometimes entire continents being invaded by it. From A.D. 1414 up to 1832 no fewer than nineteen widespread outbreaks of this kind have been recorded. The most notable of these was in 1796, when the cats in England and Holland were generally attacked by the disease, and in the following year when it had spread over Europe and extended to America; in 1803, it again appeared in this country and over a large part of the European continent.
"The symptoms are intense fever, prostration, vomiting, diarrhœa, sneezing, cough, and profuse discharge from the nose and eyes. Sometimes the parotid glands are swollen, as in human mumps. Dr. Darwin, of Derby, uncle to Charles Darwin, thought it was a kind of mumps, and therefore designated it Parotitis felina.