stripes being, however, to a great extent due
to the European wild cat. In one direction the tabby shows a tendency to
melanism which culminates in complete blackness, while in the other
direction there is an equally marked tendency to albinism; grey cats,
which may be regarded as tabbies whose stripes have disappeared, forming
the connecting link between the tabby and the white cat. A mixture of
the melanistic with the albinistic type will of course give rise to
parti-coloured cats. A third colour-phase, the "erythristic" or red, is
represented by the sandy cat, the female of which takes the form of the
"tortoise-shell," characterized, curiously enough, by the colour being a
blend of black, white, and sandy. The so-called orange tabby is one
phase of the erythristic type.

As to long-haired cats, there appear originally to have been two
closely-allied strains, the Angora and the Persian, of which the former
has been altogether replaced in western Europe by the latter. That these
long-haired cats have an ancestry, to some extent at any rate distinct
from the ordinary short-haired breeds, is practically certain, and it
has been suggested that they are derived from the "manul" cat, or
Pallas's cat (_Felis manul_), of the deserts of central Asia, which is a
long-haired and bushy-tailed species with comparatively slight striping.
The fact that in tabby Persians the body-markings are never so strong as
in the short-haired breeds is in some degree confirmatory of this, as
suggesting descent from a nearly whole-coloured type. At the present
day, however, Persians exhibit nearly all the colour and pattern types
of the short-haired breeds, the "orange Persian" representing the
erythristic phase.

Turning to the tailless or so-called Manx cats, in which the tail should
be represented merely by a tuft of hair without any remnant of bone, it
seems that the strain is to be met with in many parts of Russia, and
there is a very general opinion that it originally came from Japan or
some other far eastern country. Throughout Japan, China, Siam, and the
Malay countries, normal long-tailed cats are indeed seldom seen. Instead
of these are cats with more or less abbreviated tails, showing in
greater or less degree a decided kink or bend near the tip. In other
cases the tail is of the short curling type of that of a bulldog;
sometimes it starts quite straight, but divides in a fork-like manner
near the tip; and in yet other instances it i