220 PROCEEDINGS OP THE ACADEMY OF [1894. 



tions. The entrances and passageways to these abodes are loosely 

 barricaded with sticks, stones, leaves, feathers, bones, horse and cow 

 dropjjings, buttons, glass, tin, egg-shells, cai'tridge-cases, and other 

 cast- away evidences of the sojourn of men and animals in this spot. 

 Many of the sticks are three to four feet long and an inch in diam- 

 eter, and must have required the concerted strength of several rats to 

 move, and not a little ingenuity to convey up and over the precipitous 

 clefts to their resting-place. The bones were those of deer, smaller 

 carnivora, birds, and other animals brought thither by man and beast, 

 or which had sought refuge among the clefts to die. I was unable, 

 from the nature of their fastnesses, and lack of time and proper im- 

 plements, to penetrate their dormitories, and owing to tlie pilfering 

 foxes, lost the only specimens that got into my traps. One half- 

 grown rat was seen running among the rocks. It was lighter gray 

 than adult specimens. (Quantities of gnawed acorn hulls strewed 

 their hiding places, and were the chief evidences of the diet of this 

 species. These acorns grow abundantly on the scrub oaks, Qnercvs 

 banisteri, characteristic of these mountain tops. While its main 

 food supply is vegetable, no doubt these rats are omnivorous, and 

 take every opportunity to satisfy their carnivorous appetite. The 

 gnawed condition of the bones of recent mammalia found in Penn- 

 sylvania cave deposits, is, to my mind, almost solely due to the work 

 of this quadruped, a critical examination of these marks showing 

 not only their rodent origin, but that their size and character tit no 

 tooth so well as that of maglster. 



I am informed by Mr. H. C. Mercer (whose recent explorations of 

 Virginia caves has been ably outlined in a Bulletin of the Univer- 

 sity of Pennsylvania, dated July 4, 1894) that the Virginia cave 

 rats build a sub-globular nest of grass, etc., on the cave floor, and 

 that these are so well made internally as to resist considerable kick- 

 ing about. Prof. E. D. Cope, who secured the two specimens of 

 iii((.(/i.4er tabulated above, fi'om a cave in Wythe Co., Virginia, tells 

 me that these nests are placed at or near the sides of the cave, and 

 are often large enough to fill a bushel basket. 



The habitat of living Neoioma maglster cannot be verified by a 

 representative series of specimens from connected localities, but from 

 those now in possession, and the testimony of several of my corre- 

 spondents in Pennsylvania niid New Jersey, it is co-ordinate with the 



