326 Rats and the Balance of Nature. [Sess. 



in doing so he got hold of the centre finger of my left hand 

 and gave me a severe bite, hanging on for a second or two. 

 Managing to shake him off, he scuttled away, and in the 

 confusion escaped. My finger festered, and was very painful 

 for a long time. I have been bitten by dogs, foxes, stoats, 

 weasels, and ferrets, but these soon healed up. With the rat, 

 however, it is otherwise, as their yellow cankered chisel-teeth 

 inflict a severe wound, which is difficult to heal. The teeth 

 of the weasel tribe are clean, and though the bite is severe at 

 the time, it heals as quickly as if punctured by a surgical 

 instrument. I am therefore of opinion that in a combat with 

 a rat, though the weasel generally gets the mastery, yet, ex- 

 cept in confinement, we know not what is the result of their 

 wounds. In an experiment I made by putting a large stoat 

 and rat together, the rat commenced the attack, but after a 

 determined fight the stoat succeeded in killing him. The fol- 

 lowing day, however, I found the stoat had died from his 

 wounds. ^Notwithstanding their ferocity, weasels are delicate 

 creatures, and succumb to the slightest injury. This I dis- 

 covered while having many hundreds of them in captivity, 

 when collecting them to transport to Xew Zealand. 



There are two kinds of rats which have successively been 

 introduced into this country — the black rat {Mus rattus) and 

 the brown rat {Mus decumamcs). The vole, though popularly 

 known as the water-rat, yet belongs to a different genus. 

 It appears to me to be a sort of miniature beaver, and is 

 fond of gnawing wood. This I discovered by planting a large 

 number of young osiers on the banks of the Braid burn, 

 where voles are very plentiful, and found to my annoyance 

 that many of them were cut asunder by the animals in ques- 

 tion. As far as I have observed by dissecting them, they are 

 strictly vegetarians. 



Both the black and the brown rat seem to have been 

 natives of Central Asia, and did not appear in Europe till com- 

 paratively recent times — the black variety at the beginning of 

 the sixteenth century, and the brown about the middle of the 

 eighteenth century. Specimens of the black rat are still to 

 be seen in our museums, while living ones are occasionally 

 found in unloading ships from foreign ports. I have never 

 seen one of them alive, and I think I am correct in saying 



