To preserve their fur clean, and especially their whiskers, cats wash their faces, and generally quite behind their ears, every time they eat.  As they cannot lick those places with their tongues, they first wet the inside of the leg with saliva, and then repeatedly wash their faces with it, which must originally be an effect of reasoning, because a means is used to produce an effect; and seems afterwards to be taught or acquired by imitation, like the greatest part of human arts.

These animals seem to possess something like an additional sense by means of their whiskers; which have perhaps some analogy to the antennae of moths and butterflies.  The whiskers of cats consist not only of the long hairs on their upper lips, but they have also four or five long hairs standing up from each eyebrow, and also two or three on each cheek; all which, when the animal erects them, make with their points so many parts of the periphery of a circle, of an extent at least equal to the circumference of any part of their own bodies.  With this instrument, I conceive, by a little experience, they can at once determine, whether any aperture amongst hedges or shrubs, in which animals of this genus live in their wild state, is large enough to admit their bodies; which to them is a matter of the greatest consequence, whether pursuing or pursued.  They have likewise a power of erecting and bringing forward the whiskers on their lips; which probably is for the purpose of feeling, whether a dark hole be further permeable.

The antennae, or horns, of butterflies and moths, who have awkward wings, the minute feathers of which are very liable to injury, serve, I suppose, a similar purpose of measuring, as they fly or creep amongst the leaves of plants and trees, whither their wings can pass without touching them.

Mr. Leonard, a very intelligent friend of mine, saw a cat catch a trout by darting upon it in a deep clear water at the mill at Weaford, near Lichfield.  The cat belonged to Mr. Stanley, who had often seen her catch fish in the same manner in summer, when the mill-pool was drawn so low, that the fish could be seen.  I have heard of other cats taking fish in shallow water, as they stood on the bank.  This seems a natural art of taking their prey in cats, which their acquired delicacy by domestication has in general prevented them from using, though their desire of eating fish continues in its original strength.

Mr. White, in his ingenious History of Selbourn, was witness to a cat’s suckling a young hare, which followed her about the garden, and came jumping to her call of affection.  At Elford, near Lichfield, the Rev. Mr. Sawley had taken the young ones out of a hare, which was shot; they were alive, and the cat, who had just lost her own kittens, carried them away, as it was supposed, to eat them; but it presently appeared, that it was affection not hunger which incited her, as she suckled them, and brought them up as their mother.