The President then read an interesting letter from a member detailing new facts in the history of the domestic cat (_felis communis_). The writer's housekeeper had been making her annual brewing of elder wine, which was left in the barrel, unstopped, _secundum artem_, to ferment. Hearing an extraordinary noise in the cellar, she ventured to peep through the key-hole, and to her consternation beheld about twenty strange cats, assembled, apparently on the invitation of the Tortoise-shell of the family. They were engaged in springing in succession on the barrel, plunging their tails through the bung-hole into the delicious liquid till saturated, and then sucking them dry. The old lady distinctly heard her pet grimalkin say to a grave tabby gentleman, who seemed tasting, with an air of connoisseurship, "How! How!" to which he replied, in sounds which seemed to her very like "More brandy." The worthy dame fell down in a swoon, and was found by some of the servants in a state of insensibility, with an empty brandy bottle in her hand, and she had only sufficiently recovered to narrate the above remarkable occurrence. The letter was ordered to be published in their Annual Report, and many other _tails_ of cats formed subjects of conversation during the evening.
A learned member offered a shrewd conjecture that the common shrew was the connecting link between quadrupeds and a certain variety of woman-kind, and that the universal chain might again be traced from man to the feathered race, through the medium of the human thief, especially when he was a-robbin!
The secretary informed the society that in consequence of the discoveries of the British Association, the giraffes had been lately fed on lettuce leaves, which had so far imparted to their necks the properties of caoutchouc, that they now possessed the capability of indefinite extension. At this period of the proceedings one of the animals stretched his neck from his stable to the council room, and as the president was proceeding to offer some consolation on the head of the dead lion, by descanting on the spur in his tail, put his face into the midst of the company, and, for the first time in his life, cried out, "Bah!" which had the effect of breaking up the assembly.