Fragments of a superstitious faith in the magical, or what was till comparatively recent times so nearly allied with it, the medicinal attributes of the animal, still surviving in certain rustic and remote districts of England, where the brains of a cat of the proper color (black, of course) are esteemed a cure for epilepsy; and where, within our memory, such a faith induced a wretched being, in the shape of woman, mad with despair and rage, to tear the living heart from one of these animals, that, by sticking it full of pins and roasting it, she might bring back the regard of a man, brutal and perfidious as herself. Such formulæ are frequently to be met with in the works of ancient naturalists and physicians, and were, doubtlessly, handed down from generation to generation, and locally acted upon in desperate cases.
It is on evidence that more than one old woman has been condemned by our wise ancestors to pay the penalty of her presumed league with Satan in a fiery death, upon no better testimony than the fact that Harper, Rutterkin, or Robin had been seen entering her dwelling in the shape of a black cat. But if, in ancient times, old women, and young ones, too, have been brought to grief through the cats they fostered, certain it is that these creatures have suffered horrible reprisal at the hands of certain vagrants of the sex in our own.
Our _Felis domestica_ has, for a long time, labored under the serious disadvantage of a traditional character. Buffon sums her up as a "faithless friend, brought in to oppose a still more insidious enemy;" and Goldsmith--who, it is well known, became a writer of natural history "upon compulsion," and had neither time nor opportunity for personal observation of the habits and instincts of the creatures he so charmingly describes--followed in the track of the great naturalist, and echoes this ungracious definition.
Boys have a natural contempt for cats, and picking them up by the tail, tossing them over the wall, or tying old tin pots to their caudal end, to see how fast they can run, are among their most trifling sports at the expense of Tom and Tabby. I have known a cruel boy to roll a cat in turpentine, and set fire to her. Few men have any feeling but repugnance towards the feline race. The exceptions are in the past.