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Show 1885.] DR. HAMILTON ON THE WILD CAT FROM IRELAND. 213 Mr. La Touche says:-"I have just received your letter. Last Sunday I met one of m y Galway cousins, and he told me that he remembered when he was a boy the County Grand Jury gave money for heads of Wild Cats, which were supposed to be most numerous and destructive, and that he well remembered his father's keeper (his father was Sir John Burke, of Marble Hill, county Galway) often getting this money. I asked him if he ever saw the Cats, and he says he recollects being shown one or two, and they viere Martens, always called Cats by Irish keepers." Mr. Kennedy writes:- " I do not believe in the existence of the true Felis catus or Wild Cat as indigenous in Ireland, although Knox, Maxwell, and others state that they have seen them ; all I know is that Carte, our highest authority here (curator of the Dublin Society's Museum), has been trying for years to get a specimen of it without success. The examples alluded to are, I imagine, wild tame Cats such as you and I have seen prowling after birds and small vermin in the woods, which do much mischief in this way ; but they are smaller than the Wild Cat and have not the short bushy tail. Your friend will find in Thompson's ' Natural History of Ireland' all that can be said in favour of the Wild Cat existing in Ireland, but that is not conclusive." Sir J. W . Wilde writes:- " I have known a great number of Cats in m y time-gentle, tame, spiteful, venomous, vicious, cruel, clean, dirty, honest, stealing, &c.; but I never saw a Wild Cat, certainly not in the west of Ireland; all Cats I saw there were evidently tame ones that had got into the rocks and become wild." In another letter he says :- " Mr. La Touche has asked me to communicate with you respecting the existence of the Wild Cat in Ireland. I never met with such an animal, although, both as a sportsman and somewhat of a naturalist, I have had ample opportunities for observation. There is no purely Irish name for Cat, for the word Catt, or, as it is pronounced, Catta,is a mere corruption of the English term. In the 'Proceedings' of the Royal Irish Academy for 1860 you will find a lengthened essay of mine upon the unmanufactured animal remains then belonging to that institution : it contains much curious information on the ancient animals of Ireland. That the Domestic Cat has occasionally strayed from home and gone wild is quite true; and instances of the kind occurred in m y place in Connemara some years ago, where in a cave by the lake-side a Cat brought out her young, and, frightened by the dogs, would never come near the house again. " The only ancient reference which I can now lay hands on is that of the ancient Irish poem treated of in the tract already referred to, where it is said two Cats were procured from the cave of Ratticrohan in county Roscommon, but I see no reason for believing that they were originally wild. The word used in the original MSS. is Chait, but it is evidently a corruption of the English term." Paoc. ZOOL. Soc-1885, NO. XV. 15 |