532 Life-histories of Northern Animals 



RELA- As Rhoads has pointed out/^the proper home of the species 



MAN is sedgy or other waste land, where it does no harm directly and 



much good indirectly, because it supplies the staple food to 



countless beasts and birds of prey that are of service to man 



either commercially or as sources of aesthetic pleasure. 



But when, owing to the operation of obscure causes, the 

 Field-mice are so unduly multiplied as to be forced out of their 

 natural habitat, into regions where their interests clash with 

 those of man, then they are universally considered and cursed 

 as a nuisance. Not only do they consume the growing crops 

 in summer, but in winter their legions are quartered on the grain 

 in stacks, and engaged in driving tunnels under the snow in 

 the orchards and nurseries where, without leaving their safe- 

 hiding, they bark and kill the saplings by the thousand. 



Every creature, then, that helps to hold in check the 

 Meadow-mouse hordes should be reckoned a friend to man, 

 for in its years of outbreak this little devastator is at least the 

 most abundant foe that the Manitoba farmer has to deal with 

 in the world of claws and fur. 



Its life-history is little known, but the glimpses we have of 

 it gives promise of a wonderful fairy tale of science, in store for 

 him who will fully and carefully investigate the ways of this 

 Microtus. Its village with many streets is apparently a 

 communistic society. The storehouses are believed to be 

 common property. The frequent midden-heaps are a fairly 

 good solution of the sanitary question. This species is not 

 known to mate; probably the sexes live in promiscuity, and in 

 winter the young are guaranteed a living by the common 

 storehouses. This is a condition of affairs fulfilling the ideal 

 of some socialists; but we are forced to remember also they are 

 the lowest rank of mammal intelligence, they are the spoiled 

 of all spoilers; that their population is periodically swept away 

 by obscure causes or by disease, and that, but for their enor- 

 mous fecundity, they could not long continue in existence. 



*^ Mam. Penna., N. J., 1903, pp. 98-9. 



