From Fun magazine, 1864. 

She'll leave the old goat to take care of the poor little lambs.  A scan by the Wellcome Library, London.

We have discovered a non-surgical, instant way to be your own cat.  We call it, How to Be Your Own Cat.  There are 25 chapters with the steps involved, but results begin immediately.  Jonathan Caws-Elwitt blurbs, "It’s commonly known that you can be your own best friend or your own worst enemy.  It’s even well established that you can be your own grandpa.  But it takes a Professor Oddfellow to teach you How to Be Your Own Cat—and isn’t it about time?"

Martha Brockenbrough, author of The Game of Love and Death, notes: "I am also curious about how to be Schrödinger's cat."  There actually is much to say about being Schrödinger's cat!  We would begin by installing slatted blinds in the windows, because when light goes through a slit it's both a particle and a wave (plus, that's how the Cheshire cat got separated from its grin).  We'd get an "I am not a doormat" doormat so as to foster uncertainty.  We would collect nesting boxes.  We would always leave some mail in the mailbox  and a newspaper in the driveway so as to suggest the possibility of not being home.  We would play music by the dance band M-Theory and spin to it.  We would study ways to entangle strings (putting the macramé into M-theory).  We would adopt the pat answer of agnosticism, "I don't know."  We would collect (infinite) monkey memorabilia.  Then we'd sleep like the dead.

Of course, before you can become Schrödinger's cat in particular, you must transform into a cat in general.  Hence, How to Be Your Own Cat.

From The Boy Travellers in the Russian Empire by Thomas Wallace Knox, 1886.

From 1886. 

Here are some sheeple with very coarse wool, by H. B., 1838.

This is Marquette's Monster, a.k.a. Lennipinja or Man-Cat of the Peorias and Illinois, a.k.a. Micibisi of the Northern tribes.  The Chippewa name is Michibichi, the spirit panther "god of the waters" or "the manito of the waters and the fishes."  The Shawnese clan name is "Manetuwi Msi-pessi," a "'celestial tiger,' i.e. a meteor or shooting star.  The manetuwi msi-pessi lives in water only, and is visible not as an animal, but as a shooting star.  But the activities of this manito are not confined to the water.  He corresponds to the 'Fire Dragon' of other mythologies; and when they see a meteor, the old Miamis say that it is Lennipinja going from one sea to another" (Indiana and the Indianans by Jacon Piatt Dunn, 1919).

From Horae Apocalypticae by Edward Bishop Elliott, 1862.

From No. III. or, the Nosegay by Thomas Grady, 1816.

From Jack and the Queen Killers, 1820.

From How to Paint by A. S. Aloe Company, 1894.

From Paris Herself Again in 1878-9 by George Augustus Sala, 1879.