“My friend had a little helpless leveret brought to him, which the servants fed with milk in a spoon; and about the same time his cat kittened, and the young were dispatched and buried. The hare was soon lost, and supposed to be gone the way of most foundlings, or to be killed by some dog or cat. However, in about a fortnight, as the master was sitting in his garden in the dusk of the evening, he observed his cat, with tail erect, trotting towards him, and calling with little short inward notes of complacency, such as they use towards their kittens, and something gambolling after, which proved to be the leveret, which the cat had supported with her milk, and continued to support with great affection. Thus was a graminivorous animal nurtured by a carnivorous and predacious one! Why so cruel and sanguinary a beast as a cat, of the ferocious genus of Felis, the murian leo, (the lion of the mice,) as Linnæus calls it, should be affected with any tenderness towards an animal which is its natural prey, is not so easy to determine. The strange affection probably was occasioned by that sympathy, and those tender maternal feelings, which the loss of her kittens had awakened in her breast; and by the complacency and ease she derived to herself from the procuring her teats to be drawn, which were too much distended with milk; till from habit she became as much delighted with this foundling, as if it had been her real offspring. This incident is no bad solution of that strange circumstance which grave historians, as well as poets, assert, of exposed children being sometimes nurtured by female wild beasts, that probably had lost their young; for it is not one whit more marvellous that Romulus and Remus, in their infant state, should be nursed by a she-wolf, than that a poor little suckling leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody grimalkin.”
We shall now give the history of the Unaccountable Faculties possessed by some Animals.—Besides reflection and sagacity, often in an astonishing degree, and besides the sentiments and actions prompted by social or natural attachments, brutes seem on many occasions inspired with a superior faculty, a kind of presentiment or second sight, as it were, with regard to events and designs altogether unforeseen by the rational beings whom they concern. The following account is of unquestionable authenticity.
At the seat of the late Earl of Litchfield, three miles from Blenheim, there is a portrait in the dining-room of Sir Henry Lee, by Johnston, with that of a mastiff dog which saved his life. A servant had formed the design of assassinating his master, and robbing the house; but the night he had fixed on, the dog, which had never been much noticed by Sir Henry, for the first time followed him up stairs, got under his bed, and could not be got from thence by either master or man: in the dead of night, the same servant entered the room to execute his horrid design, but was instantly seized by the dog, and, being secured, confessed his intentions. Upon what hypothesis can we account for a degree of foresight and penetration such as this? Will it be suggested, as a solution of the difficulty, that a dog may possibly become capable in a great measure of understanding human discourse, and of reasoning and acting accordingly; and that, in the present instance, the villain had either uttered his design in soliloquy, or imparted it to an accomplice, in the hearing of the animal?
It has been disputed whether the brutes have any language whereby they can express their minds to each other; or whether all the noise they make consists only of cries, inarticulate and unintelligible even to themselves. Father Bougeant gives the following instance, among others, to prove that brutes are capable of forming designs, and of communicating those designs to others.—A sparrow, finding a nest that a martin had just built, standing very conveniently for him, possessed himself of it. The martin, seeing the usurper in her house, called for help to expel him. A thousand martins came full speed, and attacked the sparrow; but the latter being covered on every side, and presenting only his large beak at the entrance of the nest, was invulnerable, and made the boldest of them who durst approach him repent of their temerity. After a quarter of an hour’s combat, all the martins disappeared: the sparrow thought he had got the better, and the spectators judged that the martins had abandoned the undertaking. Not in the least; immediately they returned to the charge, and each of them having procured a little of that tempered earth with which they make their nests, they all at once fell upon the sparrow, and enclosed him in the nest, to perish there, though they could not drive him thence.—Can it be imagined that the martins could have been able to hatch and concert this design all of them together, without speaking to each other, or without some medium of communication equivalent to language?
Remarkable Instances of Fasting in Animals.—The following remarkable instances of brutes being able to live long without food, are related by Sir William Hamilton, in his account of the earthquakes in Italy, (Phil. Trans. vol. 73.) “At Soriano, two fattened hogs, that had remained buried under a heap of ruins, were taken out alive the 42d day; they were lean and weak, but soon recovered.—At Messina, two mules belonging to the Duke de Belviso, remained under a heap of ruins, one of them 22 days, and the other 23: they would not eat for some days, but drank water plentifully, and are now recovered.—There are numberless instances of dogs remaining many days in the same situation; and a hen belonging to the British vice-consul at Messina, that had been closely shut up under the ruins of his house, was taken out the 22d day, and is now recovered: it did not eat for some days, but drank freely; it was emaciated, and shewed little signs of life at first. From these instances, and several others of the same kind that have been related to me, but which, being less remarkable, I omit, one may conclude, that long fasting is always attended with great thirst and total loss of appetite.”
An instance not less remarkable than any of these, we find in the Gent. Mag. for Jan. 1785. “During the heavy snow which fell in the night of the 7th of January, 1776, a parcel of sheep belonging to Mr. John Wolley, of Matlock, in Derbyshire, which were pastured on that part of the East Moor that lies within the manor of Matlock, were covered with the drifted snow. In the course of a day or two all the sheep that were covered with the snow were found again, except two, which were consequently given up as lost, but on the 14th of Feb. following (some time after the break of the snow in the valleys, and 38 days after the fall) as a servant was walking over a large parcel of drifted snow, which remained on the declivity of a hill, a dog he had with him discovered one of the two sheep that had been lost, by winding (or scenting) it, through a small aperture which the breath of the sheep had made in the snow. The servant thereupon dug away the snow, and released the captive from its prison; it immediately ran to a neighbouring spring, at which it drank for a considerable time, and afterwards rejoined its old companions, as though no such accident had befallen it. On inspecting the place where it was found, it appeared to have stood between two stones which lay parallel with each other, at about two feet and a half distance, and probably were the means of protecting it from the great weight of the snow, which in that place lay several yards thick: from the number of stones around it, it did not appear that the sheep had been able to pick up any food during its confinement. Soon afterwards its owner removed it to some low lands; but as it had nearly lost its appetite, it was fed with bread and milk for some time: in about a fortnight after its enlargement, it lost its sight and wool; but in a few weeks afterwards they both returned again, and in the course of the following summer it was quite recovered. The remaining sheep was found dead, about a week after the discovery of the other.”
The following authentic history of the Extraordinary Adventures of a Sheep, which was transmitted to a respectable periodical journal, from Salisbury, where the animal died, will, we doubt not, prove interesting to our readers, as it affords an instance of animal sagacity, in that species on which Nature has bestowed it with a sparing hand.
She was born in the North Highlands of Scotland; embarked, in 1804, in the Arab, and visited Iceland, Greenland, and Norway: here she was sent on shore to graze; the next day, seeing the boat row past the place where she was feeding, she leaped into the water, and swam to the boat: this circumstance protected her ever after from the butcher, and her life was one scene of gratitude. She was in fourteen different actions with the enemy’s flotilla and batteries off Boulogne, in the last of which she lost part of one of her horns. After that she traversed the whole of the western extent of Africa, across the equator to the Brazils, and along the Guiana coast of South America to the West Indies; from thence to Ireland, and then home. She was so tame as to feed from the hand, and, like the dog, followed her protector; would dance for a cabbage leaf; preferred the house and fire-side to the stable; for several months was never known to touch hay or grass, living with the sailors on pudding and grog, and nibbling the ends of rope or canvass. The paring of an apple or a potato was her highest luxury. The docility of the animal was highly amusing: putting her head under your arm, she would eat off your plate at dinner; would drink wine or spirits, and tea, if well sweetened; run up and down the stairs; and, if she got into the kitchen, would take the cover from the pot, and peep into it. Her wool was of a soft and silky nature.
After having weathered so many storms and hardships, she was brought as a present by Lieut. Bagnold, of the royal navy, to a lady in Salisbury; where, alas! their fleecy friend died of a bowel complaint the second day after her arrival, most sincerely lamented, the 22d of January, 1808.