A CHAPTER ON CATS.

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 archaeologists, who have endeavoured to discover a profound philosophy figured and symbolised in the singular mythology of