The American Wildcat is very similar in formation, color, and character to the Wildcat of Europe, but is somewhat stronger and stouter. It undoubtedly has been a factor in the breeding of certain domestic cats in America, but so little so that no importance need be attached to it.

It can now be accepted that the so-called Domestic Cat of to-day is the descendant of certain wild species existing on the several continents ages ago, when the first members were subdued, subjugated, and, by handling, reduced to house-pets, or at least to that semi-domestication which renders them familiar with man, and useful in stables and granaries for the destruction of small vermin, or to be petted in dwellings as companions.

The domestication of the cat took place at a very ancient period. From its small size, and the fact that it is not a choice article of diet, it is not wonderful that we find few or no traces of the smaller varieties of the cat in the dolmens or kokkenmoeddings of Denmark and northern central Europe, nor in the caves of the troglodytes of France, Siberia, and the British Islands. The first evidence of the cat in connection with man is to be found in the ancient 'monuments of Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh.

In the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum is an excellent painting of a tabby-cat, which seems to be aiding a man who is capturing birds. The cat is mentioned in inscriptions as early as 1684 B.C., and it was certainly domes-ticated in Egypt thirteen hundred years before Christ. The earliest known representation of the cat as a domestic animal and pet is at Ley-den, in a tablet of the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Dynasty, wherein it appears seated under a chair. In Egypt it was an object of religions worship and the venerated inmate of certain temples. The goddess Pasht or Bubastis, the goddess of cats, was, under the Roman empire, represented with a cat's head. A temple at Beni-Hassan, dedicated to her, belongs to the period of Thothmes IV., of the Eighteenth Dynasty, 1500 B.C. Behind this temple are pits containing a multitude of cat mummies. The cat was an emblem of the sun to the Egyptians. Its eyes were supposed to vary in appearance with the course of that luminary, and likewise to undergo a change each lunar month, on which account the animal was also sacred to the moon.

Herodotus recounts instances of the strangely exaggerated regard felt for it by the dwellers on the Nile. He tells us that when a cat dies a natural death in a house, the Egyptians shave off their eyebrows; and that when a fire occurs they are more anxious to save their cats than to extinguish the conflagration.

The cat was a common animal, known to the Greeks at the period when Athens represented the civilization of the world; and later, in the Greco-Italian civilization of Herculaneum and Pompeii, in the south of Italy, and in the period of Roman supremacy, it was a well-known animal and the pet of courts and ladies' boudoirs. The first account of its domestication in Great Britain comes at a comparatively late period.

A canon enacted in the year 1127 forbade any abbess or nun to use more costly fur than that of lambs or cats; and the cat was an object of the chase in royal forests, as is shown by a license to hunt it of the date 1239, and by a similar charter given by Richard II. to the abbot of Peterborough.

In résumé, from the foregoing it is evident that the domestication of the cat, or at least its subjugation, which renders it a companion of mankind, took place at a very early period, probably synchronous with the first civilization of man himself. As pussy is an animal which, while savage, wild, and unmanageable in early age and its natural state, is yet small enough to be easily handled, and sensible enough to become reasonably sociable when it has good care and plenty of food, we can readily imagine that even in the earliest of times the young of the Wildcat was caught and brought home to the caves or tents of the first of mankind, to be a companion and pet of the children. Its thrifty, useful habits of mousing and killing vermin made it useful, so that it was probably protected and cared for at a period when mankind first laid up storehouses of grain for winter or future use. I doubt if to-day the cat in the largest city of Europe or the United States is any more of a domestic animal than it was when the nomad Aryan traveled from Asia to the west of Europe.

We have seen from the foregoing that the Domestic Cat probably comes from several sources. The Long-haired Cats derived their origin from the Indian, Bengalese, and various smaller Wildcats of Asia and southern Russia, and are known as the Asiatic, Eastern, or Longhaired Cats.