In the digestive organs of the Felicia., the salivary glands are small, and the stomach of a simple cylindrical form. The oesophagus opens at its anterior extremity, and the intestine com mences from the posterior; so that everything favors a quick passage of the food, which re ceives no mastication, and is retained a very short time in the stomach. The intestine has no valves, is small in diameter but muscular, and the whole canal, when compared with the length of the body, is extremely short, being as 3 or 5 to 1. In the domestic cat they are 5 to 1; but in the wild cat only as 3 to 1.
The Felicie are now regarded as including only two genera, Felis and Cricelurus, the latter reserved for only one species, the chetah.
Wild cats are found in all parts of the world except Australia, but principally in the warmer regions, where alone the larger species are met with.
In the caverns and river deposits of the Quaternary Period in Europe and America are found fossil remains of cats allied to or identical with living species. Such are the huge
cave lion of Europe (Felis leo, race Spelcea) and others not so well known. During the Tertiary Period they were rare, their place being taken by the Machaerodonts or sabre-tooth tigers (q.v.), animals similar to cats in many respects, but less agile, more powerful, and distinguished by enlarged sabre-like upper ca nine teeth, which indicate different habits of at tack on their prey. The appearance of true cats, both in Europe and America, is corre lated with the abundance of modern types of ruminants, etc.— slender, thin-skinned, long necked and swift-footed, in place of the pow erful and heavily proportioned pachyderms common through most of the Tertiary Period. It is probable that both sabre-tooth tigers and true cats were evolved from the Poleoniaidx, a group of primitive carnivora or Creodonta in the early Eocene; but the proof from fossils is at present fragmentary and incomplete. See CAT; COUGAR; LEOPARD; LYNX, and other names of wild cats.