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Affection in Animals

in another hour have made his own entrance-port. I then inquired of my landlady, (a sensible woman,) and heard what i have related confirmed by her, with several other singular traits of the kindnesses this bird shews to all dogs in general, but particularly to maimed or wounded ones. I hope and believe, however, Ralph is still living; and the traveller will find I have not over-rated this wonderful bird's merit."

To these instances of attachment between incongruous animals from a spirit of sociality, or the feelings of sympathy, may be added the following instance of fondness from a different motive, recounted by Mr. White, in the work already so often quoted. "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 th 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 wit 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 suck ling leveret should be fostered and cherished by a bloody rrimalkin."

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 Jchnston, 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 hours 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 c uld have been able to hatch and concert this • GILBERT & GIHON