Curiosities of Civilization

RATS.

Boswell relates that the wits who assembled at the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds to hear Grainger’s poem on the “Sugar-cane” read in manuscript, burst into laughter when, after much pompous blank-verse, a new paragraph commenced with the invocation—

“Now, Muse, let’s sing of rats.”

But if a mean topic for the bard, they are an interesting subject to the naturalist, an anxious one to the agriculturist, and of some importance to everybody. Though it was no easy matter to throw around them a halo of poetry, and to elevate them into epic dignity—a difficulty which was nowise surmounted by calling them, as Grainger subsequently did, “the whisker’d vermin race”—yet there was nothing with which they had a more serious practical connection than the “sugar-cane.” It was reckoned that in Jamaica they consumed a twentieth part of the entire crop, and 30,000 were destroyed in one year in a single plantation. In fact, rats are to the earth what sparrows are to the air—universally present. Unlike their feathered analogues, we rarely see them, and consequently have little idea of the liberality with which they are distributed over every portion of the habitable globe. They swarm in myriads in the vast network of sewers under our feet, and by means of our house-drains have free access to our basements, under which they burrow; in the walls they establish a series of hidden passages; they rove beneath the floors and the roof, and thus establish themselves above, below, and beside us. In the remote islands of the Pacific they equally abound, and are sometimes the only inhabitants. But we shall not attempt to write the universal history of the rat. It is enough if we narrate his doings in Great Britain.

There are in England two kinds of land-rats—the old English black rat, and the Norwegian or brown rat. According to Mr. Waterton, the black rat is the native and proper inhabitant of the island; the brown rat not only an interloper and exterminator, but a Whig rat—a combination which he thinks perfectly consistent. In his charming essays on Natural History he says—

“Though I am not aware that there are any minutes in the zoological archives of this country which point out to us the precise time at which this insatiate and mischievous little brute first appeared among us, still there is a tradition current in this part of the country (Yorkshire), that it actually came over in the same ship which conveyed the new dynasty to these shores. My father, who was of the first order of field naturalists, was always positive upon this point, and he maintained firmly that it did accompany the House of Hanover in its emigration from Germany to England.”

Having thus given the “little brute” a bad name, he pertinaciously hunts him through the two volumes of his essays; nay, he does more, for, on account of his Whiggism, he is the only wild animal banished for ever from Waterton Hall, that happy home for all other fowls of the air and beasts of the field, against which gamekeepers wage war as vermin. In Carpenter’s edition of Cuvier, however, an account is given of the brown rat, or Surmulot, which, if true, entirely disposes of this pretty account of his advent. We are there told that he originally came from Persia, where he lives in burrows, and that he did not set out on his travels until the year 1727, when an earthquake induced him to swim the Volga and enter Europe by way of Astrakan.[10] When once he had set foot in England, he no doubt treated his weaker brother and predecessor, the black rat, much as the Stuart dynasty was treated by the house of Hanover. Though the black rat was not himself an usurper, but rather an emigrant who took possession of an unoccupied territory, his reign is also said by some to have been contemporaneous with an earlier change in the royal line of England, for he is asserted to have come over in the train of the Conqueror. He still abounds in Normandy, and to this day is known in Wales under the name of Llyoden Ffancon—the French mouse.

Rats are no exception to the law which, Wordsworth says, prevails among “all the creatures of flood and field.”

“The good old rule,
Sufficeth them—the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.”

But the black rat has kept more than is commonly imagined. Mr. Waterton is mistaken when he adopts the popular notion that the old English breed which came in with the Conqueror is almost totally annihilated by his brown cousin. The first comer has no more been destroyed by the subsequent invader than the Celt is annihilated by the triumphant Saxon. As we find the former still holding their ground in Cornwall, Wales, and the Highlands of Scotland, so we find the black rat flourishing in certain localities. In the neighbourhood of the Tower, in Whitbread’s brewery, and in the Whitechapel sugar-refineries, he still holds his own, and woe be to any brown trespasser who ventures into his precincts. The weaker animal has learnt that union is strength, and, acting in masses, they attack their powerful foe as fearlessly as a flight of swallows does a hawk; but if an equal number of the two breeds are placed together in a cage without food, the chances are that all the black rats will have disappeared before morning, and, even though well fed, the brown Brobdingnags invariably eat off the long and delicate ears of their little brethren, just as a gourmand, after a substantial meal, amuses his appetite with a wafer-biscuit.

The rapid spread of the rat is due to the fearlessness with which he will follow man and his commissariat wherever he goes. Scarcely a ship leaves a port for a distant voyage but it takes in its complement of rats as regularly as the passengers, and in this manner the destructive little animal has not only distributed himself over the entire globe, but, like an enterprising traveller, continually passes from one country to another. The colony of four-footed depredators, which ships itself free of expense, makes, for instance, a voyage to Calcutta, whence many of the body will again go to sea, and land perhaps at some uninhabited island where the vessel may have touched for water. In this manner many a hoary old wanderer has circumnavigated the globe oftener than Captain Cook, and set his paws on twenty different shores. The rat-catcher to the East-India Company has often destroyed as many as five hundred in a ship newly arrived from Calcutta. The genuine ship-rat is a more delicate animal than the brown rat, and has so strong a resemblance to the old Norman breed, that we cannot help thinking they are intimately related. The same fine large ear, sharp nose, long tail, dark fur, and small size, characterize both, and a like antipathy exists between them and the Norwegian species. It is by no means uncommon to find distinct colonies of the two kinds in the same ship—the one confining itself to the stem, the other to the stern of the vessel. The same arrangement is often adopted in the warehouses of seaports, the ship’s company generally locating themselves as near the water as possible, and the landsmen in the more inland portion of the building.

When rats have once found their way into a ship, they are secure as long as the cargo is on board, provided they can command the great necessary—water. If this is well guarded, they will resort to extraordinary expedients to procure it. In a rainy night they will come on deck to drink, and will even ascend the rigging to sip the moisture which lies in the folds of the sails. When reduced to extremities, they will attack the spirit-casks and get so drunk that they are unable to walk home. The land-rat will, in like manner, gnaw the metal tubes which in public-houses lead from the spirit-store to the tap, and is as convivial on these occasions as his nautical relation. The entire race have a quick ear for running liquid, and they constantly eat into leaden pipes, and, much to their astonishment, receive a douche-bath in consequence. It is without doubt the difficulty of obtaining water which causes them in many cases to desert the ship the moment she touches the shore. On such occasions they get, if possible, dry-footed to land, which they generally accomplish by passing in Indian file along the mooring-rope, though, if no other passage is provided for them, they will not hesitate to swim. In the same manner they board ships from the shore, and so well are their invading habits known to sailors, that it is common upon coming into port to fill up the hawser holes, or else to run the mooring-cable through a broom, the projecting twigs of which effectually stop the ingress of these nautical quadrupeds. Their occupancy of the smaller bird-breeding islands invariably ends in their driving away the feathered inhabitants, for they plunder the nests of their eggs, and devour the young. The puffins have in this way been compelled to relinquish Puffin’s Island, off the coast of Caernarvon.

The ship-rat must not be confounded with the water-rat, which is an entirely different species. The latter partakes of the habits of the beaver, and is somewhat like him in appearance. He possesses the same bluff head and long fur, in which are buried his diminutive ears. He dwells in holes in the banks of rivers, which he constructs with a land and water entrance to provide against destruction by the sudden rising of the stream. This animal lives entirely upon vegetable food, which he will now and then seek at some distance inland, and we suspect that to him may be traced many of the devastations in the fruit and vegetable gardens for which the poor sparrows get the blame. We have seen water-rats cross a wide meadow, climb the stalks of the dwarf beans, and, after detaching the pods with their teeth, shell their contents in the most workmanlike manner. They will mount vines and feed on the grapes; and a friend informs us that on one occasion he saw a water-rat go up a ladder which was resting against a plum-tree, and attack the fruit. If a garden is near the haunts of water-rats, it is necessary to watch narrowly for the holes underneath the walls, for they will burrow under the foundation with all the vigour of sappers and miners. Such is the cunning with which they drive their shafts, that they will ascend beneath a stack of wood, a heap of stones, or any other object which will conceal the passage by which they obtain an entrance. The water-rat is, however, a rare animal compared with its first-cousin, the common brown or Norway rat, which is likewise, as Lord Bacon says of the ant, “a shrewd thing in a garden.” They select, according to Cobbett, the prime of the dessert—melons, strawberries, grapes, and wall-fruit; and though they do but taste of each, it is not, as he remarks, very pleasant to eat after them. Not many years since they existed in millions in the drains and sewers of the metropolis. Several causes have been in operation to diminish their numbers, and in some quarters of the town almost wholly to extinguish them. In the first place, the method of flushing the sewers lately adopted is exceedingly fatal to them. When the sluices are opened, go they must with the rush of waters, and they may be seen shot out by hundreds from the mouths of the culverts in the Thames. The fact that rats are worth three shillings a dozen for sporting purposes proves, however, the most certain means of their destruction, for it insures their ceaseless pursuit by the great hunter, man. The underground city of sewers becomes one vast hunting-ground, in which men regularly gain a livelihood by capturing them. Before entering the subterraneous world, the associates generally plan what routes they will take, and at what point they will meet, possibly with the idea of driving their prey towards a central spot. They go in couples, each man carrying a lighted candle with a tin reflector, a bag, a sieve, and a spade; the spade and sieve being used for examining any deposit which promises to contain some article of value. The moment the rat sees the light, he runs along the sides of the drain just above the line of the sewage water; the men follow, and speedily overtake the winded animal, which no sooner finds his pursuers gaining upon him, than he sets up a shrill squeak, in the midst of which he is seized with the bare hand behind the ears, and deposited in the bag. In this manner a dozen will sometimes be captured in as many minutes. When driven to bay at the end of a blind sewer, they will often fly at the boots of their pursuers in a most determined manner.

The favourite stronghold of the rat is that portion of the house-drain which opens at right angles into the main sewer. Here he sits like a sentinel, and in security watches with his keen but astonished eyes the extraordinary apparition running with a light. It is a remarkable fact that most untrapped house-drains are inhabited by their own particular rats, and woe be to the intruder who ventures to interfere with those in possession. The rat as well as the cat may thus be classed among the domestic animals of the household, who acts as a kind of preventive puss in keeping out the whole underground community of vermin, which otherwise would have the run of our basements.

These vermin congregate thickest in the neighbourhood of slaughter-houses, or, in other words, where food is most plentiful. They are frequently found sitting in clusters on the ledge formed by the invert of the sewers. As the scavengers of drains, they undoubtedly do good service, but it is a poor set-off for the mischief they perpetrate in destroying the brickwork of the sewers—burrowing in every direction, and thus constructing lateral cesspools, the contents of which permeate the ground and filter into the wells. In making these excavations, moreover, they invariably transfer the earth to the main sewers, and form obstructions to the flow. The accumulations of their paw-work have regularly to be removed in small trucks constructed for the purpose, and if this precaution were not taken, they would in a few years entirely destroy the vast system of subterranean culverts which have been laboriously constructed at the expense of millions. The pipe-drains with smooth barrels, which the rat’s tooth cannot touch, alone baffle him; indeed, the rapid flow of water in their narrow channel prevents his even retaining his footing in them. In revenge for thus being circumvented, he has in many cases entirely ruined the newly-laid channel of pipes by burrowing under them, and causing them to dip and open at the joints.In France the sewer authorities hold an annual hunting-match, on which occasion there is a grand capture of rats; these animals are not destined to afford sport to the “fancy” under the tender manipulations of a dog “Billy;” on the contrary, our neighbours have too much respect for the integrity of his hide. We are informed that they have established a company in Paris, upon the Hudson’s Bay principle, to buy up all the rats of the country for the sake of their skin. The soft nap of the fur when dressed is of the most beautiful texture, far exceeding in delicacy that of the beaver, and the hatters consequently use it as a substitute. The hide is employed to make the thumbs of the best gloves, its elasticity and texture rendering it preferable to kid.

Parent DuchÂtelet collected several particulars of the rats which in his day frequented the knackers’ yards at Montfaucon. Attracted by the abundance of animal food, they increased so enormously that the surrounding inhabitants, hearing that the government intended to remove these establishments, were seized with apprehension lest the vermin, when deprived of their larder, should spread through the neighbourhood, and, like a flight of locusts, swallow up everything. The alarmists may even have feared lest they should meet with a similar fate to that of the Archbishop of Mayence, who, if old chronicles are to be believed, retired to a tower in one of the isles of the Rhine to escape being devoured by a host of these creatures whose appetites were set upon him, and who, pertinaciously pursuing him to his retreat, succeeded in eating him up at last. The report of the Commission instituted to inquire into the circumstances of the Montfaucon case, showed that the apprehensions of serious damage were by no means unfounded.

“If the carcases of dead horses be thrown during the day in a corner, the next morning they will be found stripped of their flesh. An old proprietor of one of the slaughter-houses had a certain space of ground entirely surrounded by walls, with holes only large enough for the ingress and egress of rats. Within this inclosure he left the carcases of two or three horses; and when night came, he went quietly with his workmen, stopped up the holes, and then entered into the inclosure, with a stick in one hand and a lighted torch in the other. The animals covered the ground so thickly that a blow struck anywhere did execution. By repeating the process after intervals of a few days, he killed 16,050 rats in the space of one month, and 2,650 in a single night. They have burrowed under all the walls and buildings in the neighbourhood; and it is only by such precautions as putting broken glass bottles round the foundation of a house attached to the establishment, that the proprietor is able to preserve it. All the neighbouring fields are excavated by them; and it is not unusual for the earth to give way and leave these subterraneous works exposed. In severe frost, when it becomes impossible to cut up the bodies of the horses, and when the fragments of flesh are almost too hard for the rats to feed upon, they enter the body and devour the flesh from the inside, so that, when the thaw comes, the workmen find nothing below the skin but a skeleton, better cleared of its flesh than if it had been done by the most skilful operator. Their ferocity, as well as their voracity, surpasses anything that can be imagined. M. Majendie placed a dozen rats in a box in order to try some experiments; when he reached home and opened the box, there were but three remaining; these had devoured the rest, and had only left their bones and tails.”

We have been informed that these rats regularly marched in troops in search of water in the dusk of the evening, and that they have often been met in single file stealing beside the walls that lined the road to their drinking-place. As the pavement in Paris overhangs the gutters, the rats take advantage of this covered way to creep in safety from street to street. Their migratory habits are well known, and every neighbourhood has its tale of their travels. Mr. Jesse relates an anecdote, communicated to him by a Sussex clergyman, which tends to prove that the old English rat at least shows a consideration and care for its elders on the march which is worthy of human philanthropy. “Walking out in some meadows one evening, he observed a great number of rats migrating from one place to another. He stood perfectly still, and the whole assemblage passed close to him. His astonishment, however, was great when he saw amongst the number an old blind rat, which held a piece of stick at one end in its mouth, while another had hold of the other end of it, and thus conducted its blind companion.” A kindred circumstance was witnessed in 1757 by Mr. Purdew, a surgeon’s mate on board the Lancaster. Lying awake one evening in his berth, he saw a rat enter, look cautiously round, and retire. He soon returned leading a second rat, who appeared to be blind, by the ear. A third rat joined them shortly afterwards, and assisted the original conductor in picking up fragments of biscuit and placing them before their infirm parent, as the blind old patriarch was supposed to be. It is only when tormented by hunger that they appear to lose their fellow-feeling and to prey upon one another.

The sagacity of the rat in the pursuit of food is so great, that we almost wonder at the small amount of its cerebral development. Indeed, he is so cunning, and works occasionally with such human ingenuity, that accounts which are perfectly correct are sometimes received as mere fables. Incredible as the story may appear of their removing hens’ eggs by one fellow lying on his back and grasping tightly his ovoid burden with his fore-paws, whilst his comrades drag him away by the tail, we have no reason to disbelieve it, knowing as we do that they will carry eggs from the bottom to the top of a house, lifting them from stair to stair, the first rat pushing them up on its hind and the second lifting them with its fore legs. They will extract the cotton from a flask of Florence oil, dipping in their long tails, and repeating the manoeuvre until they have consumed every drop. We have found lumps of sugar in deep drawers at a distance of thirty feet from the place where the petty larceny was committed: and a friend saw a rat mount a table on which a drum of figs was placed, and straightway tip it over, scattering its contents on the floor beneath, where a score of his expectant brethren sat watching for the windfall. His instinct is no less shown in the selection of suitable food. He attacks the portion of the elephant’s tusks that abounds with animal oil, in preference to that which contains phosphate of lime; and the rat-gnawn ivory is selected by the turner as fitted for billiard-balls and other articles where the qualities of elasticity and transparency are required. Thus, the tooth-print of this little animal serves as a distinguishing mark of excellence in a precious material devoted to the decorative arts. The rat does not confine himself to inert substances: when he is hard pressed for food, he will attack anything weaker than himself. Frogs, Goldsmith says, had been introduced into Ireland some considerable time before the brown rat, and had multiplied abundantly, but they were pursued in their marshes by this indefatigable hunter, and eaten clean from off the Emerald Isle. He does not scruple to assault domestic poultry; though a rat which attempted to capture the chicken of a game-fowl was killed by the mother with beak and spur in the course of twelve minutes. The hen seized it by the neck, shook it violently, put out an eye, and plainly showed that the fowl in a conflict would be the more powerful of the two, if he was only equally daring. The number of young ducks which the rats destroyed in the Zoological Gardens rendered it necessary to surround the pools with a wire rat-fencing, which half-way up has a pipe of wirework, the circle of which is not complete by several inches in the under part, and the rat, unable to crawl along the concave roof which stops his onward path, is compelled to return discomfited.

The rats have been for a long time the pests of these gardens, attracted by the presence of large quantities of food. The grating under one of the tigers’ dens is eaten through by this nimble-toothed burglar, who makes as light of copper wire as of leaden pipes. Immediately upon the construction of the new monkey-house, they took possession, and eat through the floors in every direction to get at poor Jacko’s bread. Vigorous measures were taken to exclude them; the floors were filled in with concrete, and the open roof was ceiled; but they quickly penetrated through the plaster of the latter, as may be seen by the holes to this day. They burrowed in the old inclosure of the wombat till the ground was quite rotten; and they still march about the den of the rhinoceros and scamper over his impregnable hide. It is only by constantly hunting them with terriers that they can be kept down; and as many as a hundred in a fortnight are often despatched, their carcases being handed over to the vultures and eagles. Many of them seek in the daytime a securer retreat. They have frequently been seen at evening swimming in companies across the canal to forage in the gardens through the night, and in the morning they returned to their permanent quarters by the same route.

The proprietors of the bonded-wheat warehouses on the banks of the Thames are forced to take the utmost precautions against the entrance of these depredators; otherwise, they would troop in myriads from the sewers and waterside premises, and, as they are undoubtedly in the habit of communicating among their friends the whereabouts of any extraordinary supplies, they would go on increasing day by day as the report of the good news spread through rat-land. To repel their attentions, the wooden floors and the under parts of the doors of the granaries are lined with sheet-iron, and the foundations are sometimes set in concrete mixed with glass—matters too hard for even their teeth to discuss.

Country rats in the summer take to the fields, and create enormous havoc among the standing corn. They nibble off the ears of wheat, and carry them to their runs and burrows, where large stores have been found hoarded up with all the forethought of the dormouse. Farmers are often puzzled to account for the presence of rats in wheat stacks which have been placed upon the most cunningly-contrived stands. The fact is, these animals are tossed up with the sheaves to the rick, where they increase and multiply at their leisure, and frequently to such an extent, that a rick, seeming fair on the outside, is little better than a huge rat-pie.

The propensity of the rat to gnaw must not be attributed altogether to a reckless determination to overcome impediments. The never-ceasing action of his teeth is not a pastime, but a necessity of his existence. The writer of an interesting paper on rats in Bentley’s Miscellany has explained so clearly the dentistry of the tribe, that we extract his account:—

“The rat has formidable weapons in the shape of four small, long, and very sharp teeth, two of which are in the upper and two in the lower jaw. These are formed in the shape of a wedge, and by the following wonderful provision of nature have always a fine, sharp, cutting edge. On examining them carefully, we find that the inner part is of a soft, ivory-like composition, which may be easily worn away, whereas the outside is composed of a glass-like enamel, which is excessively hard. The upper teeth work exactly into the under, so that the centres of the opposed teeth meet exactly in the act of gnawing; the soft part is thus being perpetually worn away, while the hard part keeps a sharp, chisel-like edge; at the same time the teeth grow up from the bottom, so that as they wear away a fresh supply is ready. The consequence of this arrangement is, that, if one of the teeth be removed, either by accident or on purpose, the opposed tooth will continue to grow upwards, and, as there is nothing to grind them away, will project from the mouth and turn upon itself; or, if it be an under-tooth, it will even run into the skull above. There is a preparation in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons which well illustrates this fact. It is an incisor tooth of a rat, which, from the cause above mentioned, has increased its growth upwards to such a degree, that it has formed a complete circle and a segment of another; the diameter of it is about large enough to admit a good-sized thumb. It is accompanied by the following memorandum, addressed by a Spanish priest to Sir J. Banks, who presented it to the Museum: ‘I send you an extraordinary tooth of a rat. Believe me, it was found in the Nazareth garden (to which order I belong). I was present when the animal was killed, and took the tooth; I know not its virtues, nor have the natives discovered them.’”

We once saw a newly-killed rat to whom this misfortune had occurred. The tooth, which was an upper one, had in this case also formed a complete circle, and the point in winding round had passed through the lip of the animal. Thus the ceaseless working of the rat’s incisors against some hard substance is necessary to keep them down, and if he did not gnaw for his subsistence, he would be compelled to gnaw to prevent his jaw being gradually locked by their rapid development.

The destructive nature of the rat, the extraordinary manner in which he multiplies, and his perpetual presence—for where there is a chink that he can fill, and food for him to eat, there he will be, notwithstanding that a long line of ancestors have one after another been destroyed on the spot[11]—necessitates some counteracting influence to keep him within due bounds. This is done by making him the prey of hunting-animals and reptiles, beginning with man, and running down the chain of organized life to the gliding snake. The poor rat, although he doubtless does service as a scavenger, and must have his use in fulfilling some essential purpose of creation, finds favour nowhere: every man’s hand, nearly every feline paw, and many birds’ beaks are against him. The world thinks of him, as of the pauper boy in “Oliver Twist,”—“Hit him hard; he ain’t a’got no friends.” Dwelling in the midst of alarms, he might be supposed to pass an uneasy and nervous existence. But it is nothing of the kind. The same Providence which has furnished him with the teeth suitable to the work they have to perform, has endowed him with the feelings proper to his lot; and no animal, if he be watched from a distance, appears more happy and complacent. In danger he preserves a wonderful presence of mind, and acts upon the principle that while there is life there is hope. His cunning on such occasions is often remarkable, and evinces a reasoning power of no contemptible order:—

“A traveller in Ceylon,” says Mrs. Lee, in her entertaining “Anecdotes of Animals,” “saw his dogs set upon a rat, and, making them relinquish it, he took it up by the tail, the dogs leaping after it the whole time. He carried it into his dining-room, to examine it by the light of the lamp, during the whole of which period it remained as if it were dead,—limbs hanging, and not a muscle moving. After five minutes he threw it among the dogs, who were still in a state of great excitement, and, to the astonishment of all present, it suddenly jumped upon its legs, and ran away so fast that it baffled all its pursuers.”

The sagacity of the rat in eluding danger is not less than his craftiness in dealing with it when it comes. A gentleman, Mr. Jesse relates, who fed his own pointers, observed through a hole in the door a number of rats eating from the trough with his dogs, who did not attempt to molest them. Resolving to shoot the intruders, he next day put the food, but kept out the dogs. Not a rat came to taste. He saw them peering from their holes, but they were too well versed in human nature to venture forth without the protection of their canine guard. After half an hour the pointers were let in, when the rats forthwith joined their hosts, and dined with them as usual. If it comes to the worst, and the rat is driven to bay, he will fight with admirable resolution. A good-sized sewer-rat has been known to daunt for a moment the most courageous bull-terrier, advancing towards him with tail erect, and inflicting wounds of the most desperate nature. The bite of any rat is severe, and that of a sewer-rat so highly dangerous, that valuable dogs are rarely allowed by their masters to fight them. The garbage on which they live poisons their teeth, and renders the wounds they make deadly. Even with his great natural enemy and superior, the ferret, he will sometimes get the advantage by his steady bravery and the superiority of his tactics. Mr. Jesse describes an encounter of the kind, the circumstances of which were related to him by a medical gentleman at Kingston:—

“Being greatly surprised that the ferret, an animal of such slow locomotive powers, should be so destructive to the rat tribe, he determined to bring both these animals fairly into the arena, in order to judge of their respective powers; and having selected a fine large and full-grown male rat and also an equally strong buck ferret, which had been accustomed to hunt rats, my friend, accompanied by his son, turned these two animals loose in a room without furniture, in which there was but one window. Immediately upon being liberated, the rat ran round the room as if searching for an exit. Not finding any means of escape, he uttered a piercing shriek, and with the most prompt decision took up his station directly under the light, thus gaining over his adversary (to use the language of other duellists) the advantage of the sun. The ferret now erected his head, sniffed about, and began fearlessly to push his way towards the spot where the scent of his game was strongest, facing the light in full front, and preparing himself with avidity to seize upon his prey. No sooner, however, had he approached within two feet of his watchful foe, than the rat, again uttering a loud cry, rushed at him with violence, and inflicted a severe wound on the head and neck, which was soon shown by the blood which flowed from it; the ferret seemed astonished at the attack, and retreated with evident discomfiture; while the rat, instead of following up the advantage he had gained, instantly withdrew to his former station under the window. The ferret soon recovered the shock he had sustained, and, erecting his head, once more took the field. This second rencontre was in all its progress and results an exact repetition of the former—with this exception, that, on the rush of the rat to the conflict, the ferret appeared more collected, and evidently showed an inclination to get a firm hold of his enemy; the strength of the rat, however, was very great, and he again succeeded not only in avoiding the deadly embrace of the ferret, but also in inflicting another severe wound on his neck and head. The rat a second time returned to his retreat under the window, and the ferret seemed less anxious to renew the conflict. These attacks were resumed at intervals for nearly two hours, all ending in the failure of the ferret, who was evidently fighting to a disadvantage from the light falling full on his eye whenever he approached the rat, who wisely kept his ground and never for a moment lost sight of the advantage he had gained. In order to prove whether the choice of this position depended upon accident, my friend managed to dislodge the rat, and took his own station under the window; but the moment the ferret attempted to make his approach, the rat, evidently aware of the advantage he had lost, endeavoured to creep between my friend’s legs, thus losing his natural fear of man under the danger which awaited him from his more deadly foe.”

Driven from his defensive position, the rat continued his attacks, but with an evident loss of courage, and the ferret ultimately came to the death-grapple with his crafty antagonist. A similar battle was witnessed by a friend, with the difference that the rat, being undisturbed in his advantageous position with regard to the light, finally beat off the ferret, which was absolutely bitten into shreds over the head and muzzle. The repetition of the same conduct by a second animal shows that this particular species of cunning is a general faculty of the tribe. The main superiority of the ferret is in his retaining his hold when once he has fastened on his prey, sucking his life’s blood the while; whereas the rat fights by a succession of single bites, which wound but do not destroy. The snake prevails by his venom. Mrs. Lee relates the particulars of a combat in Africa, in which rat and snake repeatedly closed and bit at one another, separating after each assault, and gathering up strength for a fresh attack. At length the rat fell, foamed at the mouth, swelled to a great size, and died in a few minutes.[12]

If he can be savage when self-protection requires, he also has his softer moments, in which he shows confidence in man almost as strong as that exhibited by the dog or cat. An old blind rat, on whose head the snows of many winters had gathered, was in the habit of sitting beside our own kitchen fire, with all the comfortable look of his enemy, the cat; and such a favourite had he become with the servants, that he was never allowed to be disturbed. He unhappily fell a victim to the sudden spring of a strange cat. A close observation of these animals entirely conquers the antipathy which is entertained towards them. Their sharp and handsome heads, their bright eyes, their intelligent look, their sleek skins, are the very reverse of repulsive; and there is positive attraction in the beautiful manner in which they sit licking their paws and washing their faces—an occupation in which they pass a considerable portion of their time. The writer on rats in Bentley’s Miscellany relates an anecdote of a tame rat, which shows that he is capable of serving his master as well as of passing a passive existence under his protection. The animal belonged to the driver of a London omnibus, who caught him as he was removing some hay. He was spared because he had the good luck to be piebald, became remarkably tame, and grew attached to the children. At night he exhibited a sense of the enjoyment of security and warmth, by stretching himself out at full length on the rug before the fire; and on cold nights, after the fire was extinguished, he would creep into his master’s bed. In the daytime, however, his owner utilized him. At the word of command, “Come along, Ikey,” he would jump into the ample great-coat pocket, from which he was transferred to the boot of the omnibus. Here his business was to guard the driver’s dinner; and if any person attempted to make free with it, the rat would fly at them from out the straw. There was one dish alone of which he was an inefficient protector. He could never resist plum-pudding; and though he kept off all other intruders, he ate his fill of it himself. These are by no means extraordinary instances of the amiable side of rat nature when kindly treated by man, and we could fill pages with similar relations. But it seems, in addition to his other merits, that he possesses dramatic genius. We have heard of military fleas, we have seen Jacko perform his miserable imitation of humanity on the top of a barrel-organ; but who ever heard of a rat’s turn for tragedy? Nevertheless, a Belgian newspaper not long since published an account of a theatrical performance by a troop of rats, which gives us a higher idea of their intellectual nature than anything else which is recorded of them. This novel company of players were dressed in the garb of men and women, walked on their hind legs, and mimicked with ludicrous exactness many of the ordinary stage effects. On one point only were they intractable. Like the young lady in the fable, who turned to a cat the moment a mouse appeared, they forgot their parts, their audience, and their manager, at the sight of the viands which were introduced in the course of the piece; and, dropping on all-fours, fell to with the native voracity of their race. The performance was concluded by their hanging in triumph their enemy the cat, and dancing round her body.The rat, as we have said, has many enemies: the weazel, the pole-cat, the otter, the dog, the cat, and the snake hunt him remorselessly all over the world. Man, however, is his most relentless and destructive enemy. In some places he is killed for food, as in China, where dried split rats are sold as a dainty. The chiffonniers of Paris feed on them without reluctance. Nor is rat-pie altogether obsolete in our own country. The gipsies continue to eat such as are caught in stacks and barns, and a distinguished surgeon of our time frequently had them served up at his table. They feed chiefly upon grain; and it is merely the repulsive idea which attaches to this animal under every form that causes it to be rejected by the same man who esteems the lobster, the crab, and the shrimp a delicacy, although he knows that they are the scavengers of the sea. They were not always so nice in the navy. An old captain in her Majesty’s service informs us that on one occasion, when returning from India, the vessel was infested with rats, which made great ravages among the biscuit. Jack, to compensate for his lost provisions, had all the spoilers he could kill, put into pies, and considered them an extraordinary delicacy. At the siege of Malta, when the French were hard pressed, rats fetched a dollar apiece; but the famished garrison marked their sense of the excellence of those which were delicately fed by offering a double price for every one caught in a granary. Man directs his hostility against the rat, however, chiefly because he considers him a nuisance; and the gin and poison, cold iron and the bowl, a dismal alternative, are accordingly presented to him. With the former he is not so easily caught, and will never enter a trap or touch a gin in which any of his kind have fretted and rubbed. Poison is a more effectual method, but it is not always safe. Rats which have been beguiled into partaking of arsenic instantly make for the water to quench their intolerable thirst, and, though they usually withdraw from the house, they may resort in their agony to an in-door cistern, and remain there to pollute it.[13] The writer who calls himself “Uncle James,” and who, for a reason that will shortly appear, is exceedingly anxious to impress the public with the belief that the best mode of getting rid of the rat is to hunt him with terriers, states that a dairy-farmer in Limerick poisoned his calves and pigs by giving them the skim milk at which rats had drunk when under the pangs produced by arsenic. One mode of clearing them out of a house is either to singe the hair of a devoted rat, or else to dip his hind-quarters into tar, and then turn him loose, when the whole community will take their leave for a while. But this is only a temporary expedient, and in the interim the offenders are left to multiply, and perchance transfer their ravages to another part of the domain where they are equally mischievous. The same objection applies to the remedy of pounding the common dog’s-tongue, when gathered in full sap, and laying it in their haunts. They retire only to return. The Germans turn the rat himself into a police-officer to warn off his burglarious brethren. Dr. Shaw, in his General Zoology, states that a gentleman who travelled through Mecklenburg about thirty years ago saw one at a post-house with a bell about its neck, which the landlord assured him had frightened away the whole of the “whiskered vermin” which previously infested the place. Mr. Neele says that at Bangkok, the Siamese capital, the people are in the habit of keeping tame rats, which walk about the room, and crawl up the legs of the inmates, who pet them as they would a dog. They are caught young, and, attaining a monstrous size by good feeding, take the place of our cats, and entirely free the house of their own kind. But the most effectual and in the end the cheapest remedy is an expert rat-catcher. Cunning as an experienced old rat becomes, he is invariably checkmated when man fairly tries a game of skill with him. The well-trained professor of the art, who by long habit has grown familiar with his adversary’s haunts and tactics, his hopes and fears, his partialities and antipathies, will clear out a house or a farmyard, where a novice would merely catch a few unwary adventurers and put the rest upon their guard. The majority of the world have, happily for themselves, a better office, and the regular practitioner might justly address the amateur in much the same words that the musician employed to Frederick the Great, when the royal flute-player was expecting to be complimented on his performance: “It would be a discredit to your Majesty to play as well as I.”

“Uncle James,” however, is of a different opinion. This author considers that every man should be his own rat-catcher, which he evidently believes to be the most improving, dignified, and fascinating calling under the sun, as he considers rats themselves to be the crying evil of the day, second only in his estimation to the grand injustice of the old corn-law. Indeed, we cannot see from his own premises how the evil can be second to any great destructive principle, earthquakes included. He takes a single pair of rats, and proves satisfactorily that in three years, if undisturbed, they will have thirteen litters of eight each at a birth, and that the young will begin littering again when six months old; by this calculation he increases the original pair at the end of three years to six hundred and fifty-six thousand eight hundred and eight. Calculating that ten rats eat as much in one day as a man, which we think is rather under than over the fact, the consumption of these rats would be equal “to that of sixty-four thousand six hundred and eight men the year round, and leave eight rats in the year to spare.” Now, if a couple of rats could occasion such devastation in three years after the original pair marched out of the ark, how comes it that the descendants of the myriads which ages ago co-existed among us have not eaten up the earth and the fullness thereof? Uncle James conveniently forgets that animals do not multiply according to arithmetical progression, but simply in proportion to the food provided for them. He must not, however, be expected to be wiser than Malthus on the subject of animal reproduction, and he has the additional incentive to error, that he evidently paints up his horrors for an artful purpose. There can be no sort of doubt that he has several well-bred terriers to dispose of, and hence the following panacea for all the evils which afflict society.

“A dog, to be of sound service, ought to be of six to thirteen pounds weight; over that they become too unwieldy. I would also recommend, above all others, the London rat-killing terrier: he is as hard as steel, courageous as a lion, and as handsome as a racehorse!—[Uncle James is a Londoner, of course.] Let the farmers in each parish meet and pass resolutions calling upon their representatives in parliament to take the tax off rat-killing dogs. Let them devise plans for procuring some well-bred terriers and ferrets, and spread the young ones about among their men. Let there be a reward offered of so much per head for dead rats, and let there be one person in each parish appointed to pay for the same. Rats are valuable for manure; let there be a pit in each locality, and let this man stick up an announcement every week, in some conspicuous place, as to the number of rats killed, and by whom. Then, what will be the result? Why, a spirit of emulation will rise up among the villagers, and they will be ransacking every hole and corner for rats. Thus will a tone of cheerful enterprise, activity, and pleasantry come in among them, ‘with a fund of conversation;’ and instead of that crawling, dogged monotony which characterizes their general gait and manner, they will meet their employers and go to their labour with joyous steps and smiling countenances.”

The coming man, so long expected, is it seems the rat-catcher. Here is manure multiplied, agriculture improved, food husbanded, a smiling, enlightened, and conversible peasantry—and all the result of rat-catching. But a difficulty has been overlooked. When the entire population is converted into rat-catchers, rats must shortly, like the dodo, be extinct. For a while we shall become an exporting country, but this resource must fail us at last, and England’s glory will expire with its rats. Then once more we shall have a sullen, silent, discontented peasantry; “their fund of conversation” will be exhausted, or at best the villagers will be reduced to talk with a sigh of the golden age, never to be renewed, when the country enjoyed the unspeakable blessing of rat-catching. In short, we fear that Uncle James has been so exclusively devoted to the science of rat-catching, that he has neglected to cultivate the inferior art of reasoning; but, interested as we suspect it to be, we join in his commendation of the virtues of the terrier. The expedition with which a clever dog will put his victims out of their misery is such that a terrier not four pounds in weight has killed four hundred rats within two hours. By this we may estimate the destruction dealt to the race by that nimble animal, “hard as steel, courageous as a lion, and handsome as a race-horse.” A custom has sprung up within the last twenty years of watching these dogs worry rats in a pit, and there are private arenas of the kind where our fair countrywomen, leaning over the cushioned circle, will witness with admiration the cleverness of their husbands’ or brothers’ terriers. “Uncle James” might commend their taste, and think the sport calculated to furnish them with “a fund of conversation, and a spirit of cheerful enterprise and pleasantry;” but except the fact had proved it to be otherwise, we should have supposed that there was not an educated man in Great Britain who would not have been shocked at this novel propensity of English ladies.

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