Robert Liston, who, as everyone knows, was the leading London surgeon in the middle of the nineteenth century, was passionately attached to his cat, and used to introduce it to his guests at the dinner parties which, according to the custom of a past generation, he gave his medical friends. On these occasions the cat would gravely walk round the dinner table during dessert to be admired by the guests in succession, and it once happened that the top of its tail got into the wineglass of Dr. Anthony Todd Thoruson, Liston's famous colleague at University College Hospital. This man promptly struck the animal. Liston was so enraged that he started from his seat and denounced his guest in language more forcible than elegant.

Jeremy Bentham, who introduced by their names to Lord Brougham the cats seated on chairs round his table, deserves honour, not only as the foremost of modern jurists but also because, in his "Principles of Morals and Legislation," he had expressed better than others the claims of brutes to kind treatment.

The great scholar and eminent writer, St. George Mivart, has given the world a wonderfully comprehensive work on the Cat, and has used the maligned feline as his type for an introduction to the study of back-boned animals. It is he who remarks: - "We cannot, without becoming cats, perfectly understand the cat mind. "

Perhaps the unkindest picture given to us of a cat is from the pen of the naturalist Buffon. "The cat" (says this unsympathetic student)" is an unfaithful animal, kept only from necessity in order to suppress a less domestic and more unpleasant one, and although these animals are pretty creatures, especially when they are young, they have a treacherous and perverse disposition, which increases with age, and is only disguised by training. They are inveterate thieves; only when they are well brought up they become as cunning and flattering as human rascals."

The Cat In Heraldry (From Frank's Collection of Book Plates. )

Chateaubriand, referring to these scathing remarks, says: - "Buffon has belied this animal. I am labouring at her rehabilitation, and hope to make her appear a tolerably good sort of beast."

A charming reference to the ways of cats occurs in a curious and interesting book by a once famous Jesuit, Father Bougeant, who lived in the first half of the eighteenth century. There is an English translation of this work, which has passed also into other languages and several editions. This is the passage translated:-

The Printer's Mark Of Melchior Sessa, Of Venice (From a Print at the British Museum. )

"Such is one of those big-whiskered and well-furred torn cats, that you see quiet in a corner, digesting at his leisure, sleeping if it seems good to him, sometimes giving himself the pleasure of hunting, for the rest enjoying life peaceably, without being troubled by the events which agitate us, without tiring his mind by a thousand useless reflections, and little caring to communicate his thoughts to others. Truly it needs only that a female cat (une chatte) come on the scene to derange all his philosophy; but are our philosophers wiser on such occasions ? "

A Merchant's Mark (From a Print at the British Museum. )

The cat, as the emblem of independence and liberty, has been used in heraldry, statuary, and signboards. In the sixteenth century a well-known firm of printers named Sessa, at Venice, adopted the device of a cat surrounded by curious ornamentation, and Dibdin in one of his works tells us that whenever you see Sessa's cat you may be sure the book is a good one and worth reading. Ever since the days when the Romans carried on their banners the design of a cat, this combative and courageous animal has been a favourite symbol of warriors and nobles. The wife of King Clovis, Clotilde, had a cat sable upon her armorial bearings, springing at a rat, and on the famous Katzen family's shield was a cat holding a mouse in its mouth. In Scotland the Clan Chattan was known by the emblem of a wild cat with the significant motto, "Touch not the cat, but" (meaning without) "the glove." Their chief was called Mohr au chat, or the great wild cat.

M. Champfleury, dealing with cats in heraldry, tells us that the French Republic resumed heraldic possession of the cat and added it to its glorious shield of arms; and an illustration is given in his book of the republican painter's figure of Liberty holding a pike surmounted with a Phrygian cap, and at her feet is seated a cat.

In past, rather than in present, days the cat was used on signboards, especially in France. We read of "La Maison du chat pelote" (i. e. which rolls itself up), and "La Maison du chat qui peche. "In the Lombards' quarter of Paris, "Le Chat Noir" was formerly a familiar figure above restaurants and confectioners. In England we often come across "The Cat and the Fiddle" as a signboard to old country village inns, and in Cassell's "Old and New London" a writer says:- "Piccadilly was the place in which 'The Cat and Fiddle' first appeared as a public-house sign. The story is that a Frenchwoman, a small shopkeeper, had a very faithful and favourite cat, and that in lack of any other sign, she put over her door the words: 'Voici un chat fidele. 'From some cause or other, the ' Chat Fidele' soon became a popular sign in France, and was speedily Anglicised into 'The Cat and Fiddle,' because the words form part of one of our most popular nursery rhymes."

Many are the popular traditions, maxims, proverbs, and superstitions connected with the cat. In olden days her every movement was looked upon as a sign of ill-omen or of good luck. Old nurses would drive a cat out of the bedroom with much significance of manner, that it might not "suck the child's breath." There is a superstition that a cat will not remain in a house with an un buried corpse.