Charles Dickens
Cat Stories
「1862-Jun-07」 Charles Dickens, “Cat Stories,” All The Year Round 7「Google Books」 (1862-Jun-07): 308-312.
The cat, like all other animals, is most sensitive to the great talisman we call kindness, and expresses its wants, confidence, and gratitude, equally as much as, if not more than, the dog.…Water should always be placed within their reach. As to their want of attachment, there is not doubt that it is generally owing to the neglect (if not worse treatment) they often experience. Every animals will ordinarily return kindness for kindness, and if persons will only try, they will not find cats an exception. (310-311)
Remarks of the late Rev. Caesar Otway, in his lecture on the Intellectuality of Domestic Animals, before the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, some years ago, deserve attention.…Those who are interested in anecdotes of instinct, sagacity, mind, and affections of animals, may be referred, amongst the various book written on this subject, to one lately published by the Rev. F. O. Morris, called Anecdotes in Natural History, and also to the same writer’s Records of Animal Sagacity and Character; with a preface of the Future Existence of the Animal Creation 「and」Bewick in his chapter on cats. (310)
There is unquestionable more in the minds of all animals than they ordinarily get credit for. Don’t you believe, we say to the owner of some favourite dog, cat, or horse, that there was once a time when that bright and expressively would have conveyed still more emotion and meaning than it does now? And is not Mr. Ruskin right when he says: “There is in every animal’s eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange life through which their life looks at and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellowship of the creature, if not the soul”? (312)
