he complains of severe cross-examination, it is
his own act in some degree that has brought it
on him.

They manage this matter, like many other
matters, far better in France. The French
imperial judges must assign counsel to every
prisoner, no matter what his offence. This is
a substantial benefit, far more useful to the
innocently-accused person than the questionable
tenderness we have been discussing. And, above all,
there is, in France, a Court of Criminal Appeal,
wherein wrongs done by inflamed and excited
juries may be set right, and a new trial ordered.

The venerable Lord Brougham, Mr. Stuart
Wortley, Sir Erskine Perry, and a host of legal
authorities, are in favour of such a change as
has been here discussed. There is little doubt
but it will receive a fresh indorsement from the
great law reformers, at the coming Social Science
Congress.

CAT STORIES.

HERODOTUS tells us that "on every occasion
of a fire in Egypt, the strangest prodigy occurs
with the cats. The inhabitants allow the fire
to rage as it pleases, while they stand about at
intervals, and watch these animals, which,
slipping by the men, or else leaping over them,
rush headlong into the flames. When this
happens, the Egyptians are in deep affliction. If a
cat dies in a private house by a natural death,
all the inmates of the house shave their
eyebrows; on the death of a dog, they shave the
head and the whole of the body. The cats
are taken on their decease to the city of Bubastis,
where they are embalmed, after which they
are buried in certain sacred repositories." Sir
J. G. Wilkinson, in his notes on the above, and
on the capital punishment inflicted on those
who wilfully killed any sacred animal, says:
"The law was, as Herodotus says, against a
person killing them on purpose, but the prejudiced
populace in after times did not always
keep within the law, and Diodorus declares that
if any person killed an ibis or a cat, even
unintentionally, it infallibly cost him his life, the
multitude collecting and tearing him to pieces.
For fear of which calamity, if anybody found
one of them dead, he stood at a distance, and
calling with a loud voice, made every
demonstration of grief, and protested that it was
found lifeless. And to such an extent did they
carry this custom, that they could not be deterred
by any representation from their own
magistrates, from killing a Roman who had
accidentally killed a cat.

Herodotus also relates that the number of
domestic animals in Egypt was very great, and
would be still greater were it not for what
befals the cats. When the females have kittened,
he says, the toms, provoked by the exclusive
attention paid by the mothers to their offspring,
are in the habit of seizing the kittens, carrying
them off, and killing them, but they do not eat
them afterwards. This curious artifice is
attended with success.

The city of Bubastis was the chief seat of the
worship of the Egyptian divinity of that name,
called Pasht. The cat was sacred to this
goddess, who herself was represented in the form
of a cat, or of a female with the head of a cat,
some specimens of which representations are still
extant. The ancients identified Bubastis with
the Greek Artemis (or Diana). Each was
regarded as the goddess of the moon. "The cat,
also, was believed by the ancients to stand in.
some relation to the moon, for Plutarch says
that the cat was the symbol of the moon on
account of her different colours, her busy ways at
night, and her giving birth to twenty-eight
young ones during the course of her life, which is
exactly the number of the phases of the moon."
(Smith's Dictionary.) In another place,
however, Plutarch gives a different account of the
symbolic meaning of the cat. In the Egyptian
figures the cat is not always clearly
distinguishable from the lion. It appears as the type
of the coins of Bubastis. Cats do certainly
enjoy themselves on moonlight nights; and
there appears something appropriate in their
ancient consecration to the moon. They
certainly do make an awful noise, sometimes, on
moonlight nights; who has not been startled
on some such night by a sudden burst of
squalling of cats under his window? How they
must have revelled under a bright Egyptian
moon in the streets and porticos of Bubastis!

It might occur to some that "puss" is derived
from that Egyptian name Pasht; but perhaps it
is best to acquiesce in the derivation from the
Latin pusus (a little boy), or pusa (a little girl).

Now, for a short reference to the natural
history of the cat. Most persons are aware that
the feline tribe comprises, besides cats—lions,
tigers, leopards, and lynxes. Most persons have
heard of the beautiful contrivance by which the
claws of these animals are preserved constantly
sharp: being drawn, when not used, by certain
tendons, within a sheath or integument, while
only the soft parts of the foot come in contact
with the ground, thus enabling the animal to
tread noiselessly. The roughness of the cat's
tongue is due to a multitude of horny papillæ
(much stronger, of course, in lions and tigers), by
which it is materially helped to keep itself clean:
a most important point, for cleanness is a necessity
to cats, inasmuch as if they had the slightest
smell about them, their prey would detect their
presence, and never come within their reach.
As it is, the cat is so free from smell, that she
may sit close to the holes of mice without
their being aware of it, although they possess
a fine sense of smell. A cat never eats a
morsel of anything, whatever it is, without
afterwards sitting down to clean and wipe its
face and lips. The caution for which it is so
remarkable is likewise evinced in its choice of
secluded spots for bringing up its offspring;
very often some hole or corner little thought of
by the inmates of the house; if the young
be removed and placed elsewhere, the mother
will frequently take them again and again to the
place chosen by herself. Another characteristic