584. MURIDAS—EPIMYS 
Black Rat as in his day living in ceilings and wainscots, the “ Norway 
Rats” in shores and sewers. He relates how he at one house caught 
the latter in the cellars, but in the upper part of the house nothing but 
Black Rats; he put all together in a great cage, intending to show them 
to his employer in the morning, but the Norway Rats promptly killed 
and devoured the Black Rats in his presence. Thomas Swaine, in 
The Vermin Catcher, 1783, states that in the fifteen counties in which 
he worked he never met Black Rats except in Bucks—a few in High 
Wycombe—and Middlesex ; while in the city of London he found very 
few Norway Rats, but quantities of Black Rats. He thought the 
Norway Rats came from the shipping in the Port of London, and 
dispersed to country districts, where they were better able to master 
the Black Rats. In 1776 Pennant (4rzz. Zool, i, 101) noted that “the 
Norway rat has also greatly lessened their numbers, and in many 
places almost extirpated them”; and Goldsmith (Vaz. H77s¢., iv., 66, 1776) 
referred to it as “the Common Rat, as it was once called, but now 
common no longer.” 
Donovan (1820) speaks of it familiarly—and he observed the 
expulsion from a house in London of a numerous colony by Brown 
Rats. Frank Buckland quotes a passage showing that about 1850, 
certain of the older granaries of the Metropolis were still tenanted by 
this species, and in Bell’s ed. ii. (303) it is said that they could still be 
found in old houses in London'tand Edinburgh; but Macgillivray stated 
in 1838 that he had not seen a specimen captured in the latter city 
within the preceding fifteen years. About 1860 it “was not rare in 
Warwickshire, but we now doubt the possibility of obtaining a single 
example” (Bell, ed. ii., 303). It is said to have recently existed in 
Westmoreland in small numbers about fell-side farms (J. Goodchild, 
Lakeland, 80, 1883), and it was reported from parts of Cheshire as still 
not uncommon in 1890 (Coward and Oldham). No doubt many whose 
memories went back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century 
could recall unexterminated colonies of Black Rats; but the identifica- 
tion cannot always be trusted, for in many cases there has been 
confusion with Azbernzcus, the black race of the Brown Rat. For an 
account of these various records, see Harting (/ze/d, 26th July 1879, 
144; and Essays on Sport and Nat. Hist, 156-170, 1883) and Millais 
(ii., 207). 
As regards rural Scotland, it was described in 1813 as the only 
species met with in Forfar, and as being not rare in all the inland 
districts of Angusshire (Don, Appendix, 38; in Hendrick, Agriculture 
of Forfar). They were common in Aberdeenshire until about 1830. 
The Rev. G. Gordon sent specimens from Elgin, where, however, it was 
1 Mr Cocks has called our attention to the discovery of a colony in 1875 in a 
house on Cornhill, London ; see also Land and Water, May 1874, 399. 
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