RATS.

Not far from the picturesque house built by Decimus Burton, in one of the cages fronting the office of the superintendent of the gardens, is to be seen a beaver. The wonderful instinct of this little animal is certainly not inferior to that of the huge elephant. As yet he has not been placed in circumstances to enable the public to witness his building capacities; but it is the intention, we understand, of the Council to give him a stream of running water and the requisite materials to construct one of those extraordinary dams for which this animal is so famous. In Canada, where he used to flourish, the backwoodsmen often came upon hill-sides completely cleared of good-sized trees by colonies of these little creatures, who employed the felled timber to construct their dams—dams, not of a few feet in length, but sometimes of a hundred and fifty feet, built according to the best engineering formula for resisting the pressure of water, namely, in an angle with its apex pointed up the stream, and gradually narrowing from base to summit. In short, Mr. Brunel himself could not outdo your beaver in his engineering operations. Even in confinement this sagacious Rodent loves to display his skill, as we may learn from Mr. Broderip’s account of his pet Binney:—

“Its building instinct,” says that accomplished naturalist, “showed itself immediately it was let out of its cage, and materials were placed in its way, and this before it had been a week in its new quarters. Its strength, even before it was half-grown, was great, it would drag along a large sweeping-brush, or a warming-pan, grasping the handle with its teeth, so that the load came over its shoulder, and advancing in an oblique direction till it arrived at the part where it wished to place it. The long and large materials were always taken first; and two of the longest were generally laid crosswise, with one of the ends of each touching the wall,and their other ends projecting out into the room. The area caused by the cross-brushes and the wall he would fill up with hand-brushes, rush baskets, books, boots, sticks, cloths, dried turf, or anything portable. As the work grew high, he supported himself on his tail, which propped him up admirably; and he would often, after laying on one of his building materials, sit up over against it, appearing to consider his work, or, as the country people say, ‘judge it.’ This pause was sometimes followed by changing the position of the materials, and sometimes they were left in their place. After he had piled up his materials in one part of the room (for he generally chose the same place), he proceeded to wall up the space between the feet of a chest of drawers which stood at a little distance from it, high enough on its legs to make the bottom a roof for him, using for this purpose dried turf and sticks, which he laid very even, and filling up the interstices with bits of coal, hay, cloth, or anything he could pick up; the last place he seemed to appropriate for his dwelling, the former work seemed to be intended for a dam. When he had walled up the space between the feet of the chest of drawers, he proceeded to carry in sticks, cloths, hay, cotton, and to make a nest; and when he had done, he would sit up under the drawers, and comb himself with the nails of his hind feet.”

Well done, Binney! If the beaver in the garden will only work out his natural instincts as perfectly, we may expect some amusement. Up to a late period the beaver had become rather a scarce animal, the exigencies of fashion having nearly exterminated him. When silk hats came in, however, the annual slaughter of hundreds of thousands of his race, for the sake of the fur, gradually slackened, and now he is beginning to increase in his native retreats,—a singular instance this of the fashions of Paris and London affecting the very existence of a prolific race of animals in the New World! In the very next compartment is a hare, who for years played the tambourine in the streets of the metropolis, but his master, finding that his performances did not draw, exchanged him at these gardens for a monkey; and now, whilst he eats his greens in peace, poor Jacko, in a red cloak and a feathered cap, has probably to earn his daily bread by mimicking humanity on the top of a barrel-organ. But the hippopotamus surges into his bath in the inclosure as we pause, and there is a rush of visitors to see the mighty brute performing his ablutions. He no longer gives audience to all the fair and fashionable folks of the town. Alas for the greatness of this world! the soldier-crab and the Esop prawn now draw better “houses.” Whether or no this desertion has embittered his temper, we cannot say, but he has certainly lost his amiability, notwithstanding that he stillretains the humorous curl-up of the corners of his mouth which Doyle used to hit off so inimitably. At times, indeed, he is perfectly furious, and his vast strength has necessitated the reconstruction of his house on a much stronger plan. Those only who have seen him rush with extended jaws at the massive oaken door of his apartment, returning again and again to the charge, and making the solid beams quiver as though they were only of inch-deal, can understand the dangerous fits which now and then are exhibited by a creature, who was so gentle, when he made hisdébut, that he could not go to sleep without having his Arab keeper’s feet to lay his neck upon. This affection for his nurse has undergone a great change, for, on Hamet’s countryman and coadjutor, Mohammed, making his second appearance with the young female hippopotamus, Obaysch very nearly killed him in the violence of his rage. He has a peculiar dislike to the sight of working men, especially if they are employed in doing any jobs about his apartment. The smith of the establishment happening one day to be passing along the iron gallery which runs across one side of his bath, the infuriated animal leapt out of the water, at least eight feet high, and would speedily have pulled the whole construction down, had not the man run rapidly out of his sight. We trust his temper will improve when his young bride in the adjoining room is presented to him; but she is as yet but a baby behemoth, although growing fast. The enormously strong iron railings in front of his apartments are essential to guard against the rushes he sometimes makes at persons he does not like. Look at that huge mouth, opened playfully to receive nic-nacs! What is a bun or a biscuit to him? Down that huge throat goes one hundred pounds weight of provender daily. Surely the dragon of Wantley had not such a gullet.

The giraffes in the adjoining apartment have been in the gardens so long that they are no longer thought a rarity; but it should be remembered that the four procured in 1835 from Khordofan by the agent of the society were, like the hippopotamus, the first ever exhibited in Europe since the days of ancient Rome. Of these only one female now remains; but verymany have been bred in the gardens, and have continued in excellent health. At the present moment three of their progeny are housed in the apartment we are entering. The finest, a male, is a noble fellow, standing nearly seventeen feet high. When he strides out into the inclosure, high up as the trees are protected by boarding, he yet manages to browse as in his African forests, and it is then that the visitor sees the full beauty of the beast, which is lost in the house. The giraffe, in spite of his mild and melancholy look, which reminds us forcibly of the camel, yet fights ferociously with his kind at certain seasons of the year. Two males once battled here so furiously that the horn of one of them was actually driven into the head of the other. Their method of fighting is very peculiar: stretching out their fore and hind legs like a rocking-horse, they use their heads, as a blacksmith would a sledgehammer, and swinging the vertebral column in a manner calculated, one would think, to break it, they bring the full force of the horns to bear upon their antagonist’s skull. The blow is severe in the extreme, and every precaution is taken to prevent these conflicts.

As we pass along a narrow corridor in which the ostriches are confined, we reach at length the last inhabitant of the garden, and the most curious creature, perhaps, which it contains. If the keeper is at hand, he will open the door of the box in which it lives, and drive out for us the bewildered-looking apteryx—the highest representative, according to Professor Owen, of the warm-blooded class of animals that lived in New Zealand previous to the advent of man. Strange and chaotic-looking as are most of the living things brought from Australia and the adjacent islands, this creature is certainly the oddest of the bird class, and is, we believe, the only one ever seen out of New Zealand. As it vainly runs into the corners and tries to hide itself from the light of day, we perceive that it is wingless and tailless; it looks, in short, like a hedgehog mounted upon the dwarfed yet powerful legs of an ostrich, whilst its long bill, which seems as though it had been borrowed from a stork, is employed when the bird leansforward, to support it, just as an old man uses a stick. This strange creature seems to hold among the feathered bipeds of Polynesia a parallel position to the New Holland mole (Ornithorhynchus paradoxicus)—which possesses the bill and webbed feet of a duck with the claws of a land animal—among the quadrupeds. Mr. Gould remarks that nature affords an appropriate vegetation to each class of animal life. Our universal mother seems to have matched her Flora to her Fauna in this portion of the globe; at least, the paradoxical creatures we have mentioned seem in happy accord with Australian vegetation, where the stones grow outside the cherries, and the pear-shaped fruits depend from the branch with their small ends downwards! The apteryx is entirely nocturnal in its habits, pursuing its prey in the ground by smell rather than by sight; to enable it to do which, the olfactory openings are placed near the point of the beak. Thus the bird scents the worm on which it feeds far below the surface of the ground. We must not regard the apteryx as an exceptional creature, but rather as the type of a large class of birds peculiar to the islands of New Zealand, which have been destroyed, like the dodo in the Mauritius, since the arrival of man. Professor Owen, long before the apteryx arrived in England, pronounced that a single bone found in some New Zealand watercourse had belonged to a wingless, tailless bird that stood at least twelve feet high.[9]This scientific conjecture has lately been transformed into a certainty by the discovery of a number of bones, which demonstrate that several species of Moas once roamed among the fern-clad islands which stud the bright Polynesian ocean. These bones have been found mixed with those of the apteryx, which thus becomes linked to a race of mysterious creatures, which, it is supposed, have long passed away, although a tale is told—an American one, it is true—of an Englishman having come across a dinornis, whilst out on itsnocturnal rambles, and of his having fled from it with as much terror as though it had been a griffin of old.

Our walk through the gardens has only enabled us to take a cursory glance at a few of the 1,300 mammals, birds, and reptiles at present located there; but the duty of the zoologist is to dwell minutely on each. To such these gardens have, for the last twenty-six years, been a very fountain-head of information. During that time a grand procession of animal life, savage and wild, has streamed through them, and for the major part has gone to that “bourne from which no traveller returns.” Let us rank them, and pass them before us:—

—making a total of 14,205. Out of this large number many curious animals have doubtless left no trace; but through the care of the Council, no rare specimen has died, within these five years at least, without previously sitting for his portrait. The first part of the valuable collection of coloured drawings, from the inimitable pencil of Mr. Wolf, accompanied by a description from the pen of the late Mr. Mitchell, the editor of the work, is published, under the title of “Zoological Sketches, &c.,” and the others will speedily follow. The work, when completed, will be unique in the annals of zoology, both for the extreme beauty of the drawings, which may be said to daguerreotype the subjects in their most characteristic attitudes, and for the nature of the letterpress, which proves that the editor has written from the life.

This splendid collection has been got together by presents, purchase, breeding, and exchanges. Out of the 14,205 specimens, however, which have been in the possession of the society, scarcely a tithe were bought. The Queen, especially, has been most generous in her presents, and the stream ofbarbaric offerings in the shape of lions, tigers, leopards, &c., which is continually flowing from tropical princes to the fair Chief of the nation, is poured into these gardens. Her Majesty evidently pays no heed to the superstition once common among the people, that a dynasty was only safe as long as the lions flourished in the royal fortress. In fact, the gardens are a convenience to our gracious monarch as well as to her subjects; for wild animals are awkward things to have in one’s back premises. Neither must we overlook the reproduction which has taken place in the gardens; to such an extent, indeed, has the stock increased, that sales to a large amount are annually made. The system of exchanges which exists between the various British and continental societies helps to supply the garden with deficient specimens in place of duplicates. Very rare, and consequently expensive animals, are generally purchased. Thus, the first rhinoceros cost 1,000l.; the four giraffes 700l., and their carriage an additional 700l.The elephant and calf were bought in 1851 for 800l.; and the hippopotamus, although a gift, was not brought home and housed at less than 1,000l.—a sum which he more than realized in the famous Exhibition season, when the receipts were 10,000l.above the previous year. The lion Albert was purchased for 140l.; a tiger in 1852 for 200l.The value of some of the smaller birds will appear, however, more startling: thus, the pair of black-necked swans were purchased for 80l.(they are now to be seen in the three-island pond); a pair of crowned pigeons and two maleos, 60l.; a pair of Victoria pigeons, 35l.; four mandarin ducks, 70l.Most of these rare birds (now in the great aviary) came from the Knowsley collection, at the sale of which, in 1851, purchases were made to the extent of 985l.It would be impossible from these prices, however, to judge of the present value of the animals. Take the rhinoceros, for example: the first specimen cost 1,000l.; the second, quite as fine a brute, only 350l.Lions range again from 40l.to 180l., and tigers from 40l.to 200l.The price is generally ruled by the state of the wild-beast market, and by the intrinsic rarity of the creature. A first appearancein Europe, of course, is likely to draw, and is therefore at the top price; but it is wonderful how demand produces supply. Let any rare animal bring a crowd to the gardens, and in a twelvemonth numbers of his brethren will be generally in the market. The ignorance displayed by some persons as to the value of well-known objects is something marvellous. We have already spoken of the sea captain who demanded 600l.for a pair of pythons, and at last took 40l.! On another occasion, an American offered the society a grisly bear for 2,000l., to be delivered in the United States; and, more laughable still, a moribund walrus, which had been fed for nine weeks on salt pork and meal, was offered for the trifling sum of 700l.!

We could go on multiplying,ad nauseam, instances of this kind, but must conclude the catalogue of absurdities by stating that there is a firm belief on the part of many persons that it is the Zoological Society which has proposed the large reward, which every one has heard of, forthetortoiseshell Tom. “The only one ever known” has been offered accordingly at the exceedingly low figure of 250l.On one occasion a communication was received from some person of consideration in Thuringia, requesting to be informed of the amount of the proffered prize, which he was about to claim. This was shortly followed by a letter from another person, evidently written in a fury, cautioning the society against giving the prize to the previous writer, as he was not the breeder of the cat, but was only trying to buy it for less than its value, “in which he would never succeed so long as the true breeder lived.” To prevent further applications on the behalf of growers of this unique animal, we may as well state that tortoiseshell Toms may be had in many quarters.

We have said that the value of animals depends upon the state of the wild-beast market. “Wild-beast market!” exclaims the reader; “and where can that be?” Every one knows that London can furnish anything for money; and if any lady or gentleman wants lions or tigers, there are dealers in Ratcliffe Highway and the adjacent parts, who have them on the premises, and will sell them at five minutes’ notice. They“talk as familiarly of lions as ladies do of puppy dogs;” and a gentleman who purchased a bear of one of them, lately informed us that the salesman coolly proposed that he should take him home with him in a cab! We once had occasion to visit the establishment of one of these dealers, and were shown up a ladder into a cockloft, where, hearing a bumping, and perceiving a lifting motion in a trap-door, we inquired the reason, which called forth the dry remark that it was only three lions at play in a box below. Although these men generally manage to secure their live stock in a satisfactory manner, yet accidents will occur in the best-regulated lion-stores. A wild-beast merchant, for instance, informed us that one night he was awakened by his wife, who drew his attention to a noise in the back-yard, where he had placed two lions on the previous evening. On putting his head out of the window—his room was on the ground-floor—there were the lions loose, and, with their paws on the window-sill, looking grimly in upon him. A good whip and a determined air consigned Leo to his cage again without further trouble. On another occasion this same man, hearing a noise in his back premises, found to his horror that an elephant, with his pick-lock trunk, had let out a hyæna and a nylghau from their cages, and was busy undoing the fastenings of a den full of lions! The same resolute spirit, however, soon restored order. Amateurs have not always the same courage or self-possession, and they immediately have recourse to the garden-folks to get them out of their difficulties, as a housekeeper would send to the station-house on finding a burglar secreted in his cellar. On one occasion a gentleman, who had offered a rattlesnake and its young to the gardens at a high price, sent suddenly to the superintendent to implore immediate assistance, as the said snake, with half a score venomous offspring, had escaped from their box and scattered themselves in his nursery. The possessor, to avoid worse losses, was only too glad to be rid of his guests at any pecuniary sacrifice.

We cannot close our survey without touching upon the cost of the commissariat. The slaughtered beasts appropriated tothe carnivora, we have before stated, cost in the year 1854 no less a sum than 1,367l.19s. 5d. If we go through the other items of food, we shall give some notion of the expense and the variety of the banquet to which the animals daily sat down during that year. Thus we see hay figures for 912l.14s.; corn, seeds, &c., 700l.8s. 8d.; bread, buns, &c. (for the monkeys), 150l.16s. 8d.; eggs, 87l.4s. 1d. (for the ant-eater principally); milk, 69l.6s. 2d.; mangold-wurzel, carrots, and turnips, 22l.6s.; dog-biscuit, 135l.19s. 10d. (for the bears and wolves and dogs chiefly); fish (for the otters, seal, pelicans, &c.), 214l.8s. 8d.; green tares, 23l.16s. 8d.; rabbits and pigeons (for the snakes), 33l.13s. 2d.; rice and oil-cake, 66l.15s.; sundries, including fruit, vegetables, grasshoppers, snakes, mealworms, figs, sugar, &c. (for the birds principally), 157l.1s. 11d.: making a total of 3,942l.8s. 3d.; a great increase on the food bill of 1853, and which was caused entirely by the advance of prices.

The pitch of excellence to which the gardens have arrived has naturally resulted in drawing the increased attention of the public towards them. We have only to contrast, for instance, the number of people who entered in the year 1848—the first in which a more liberal system of management came into play—with those who passed in in 1854, to see that the establishment flourishes under the auspices of the new management; for while in the former year only 142,456 persons passed through the turnstiles, the number had risen in the latter to 407,676. It is interesting to observe that, although an increase of full 100 per cent. took place upon the privileged and ordinary shilling visitors during that interval, yet that the reduction of the admittance-charge to sixpence on Mondays and holidays was the main cause of the gradual influx of visitors—the year 1848 showing only 60,566 admittances of these holiday-folks and working-people, to 196,278 in 1854. Here, then, we have an increase of 135,712 persons, many of whom were, no doubt, rescued, on those days at least, from the fascinations of the public-house. With all this flood of life—the greater portion of it undoubtedly belonging to the labouring-classes,—not the slightest injury has been done to the gardens. A flower or twomay have been picked, but not by that class of Englishmen who were once thought too brutal to be allowed access unwatched to any public exhibition. Every year that passes over our heads proves that such shows as these are splendid examples of the method of teaching introduced by Bell and Lancaster; that they furnish instruction of a nature which is never forgotten, and which refines at the same time that it delights.

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 theremote 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 blackrat, 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 theyconstantly 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, forthey 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 asmany 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 theprocess 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 theLancaster. 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 patriarchwas 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 manœuvre 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 troopin 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 inBentley’s Miscellanyhas explained so clearly the dentistry of the tribe, that we extract his account:—

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