Scientific Intelligence. — Zoology. 411 



of animals undergo, which may be inserted here. Some ani- 

 mals, he remarks, travel with a particular vegetation, and 

 others along with man ; some have been presented to Europe 

 from America, and others have passed over from the old world 

 to the new. Amongst the Mammalia it is always the smallest, 

 belonging to the Glires, and the Insectivora, which most pre- 

 vail. The very smallest of the mammalia, the pigmy shrew- 

 mouse, Sorex pigviCBus of Pallas, which was never before seen 

 in Germany, has within these few years been discovered in Silesia 

 and in Mecklenburg. Many species of mice and rats are con- 

 tinually advancing from Asia into Europe. At the present time 

 the black-rat (Mus Rattus) is no longer the common rat, but 

 another stranger species, so new that Linnaeus was not acquaint- 

 ed with it, and the epoch of whose arrival at Astrakan is as- 

 cribed by Pallas to the year J 727, has effected the disappear- 

 ance of the former wherever commerce is established. This visi- 

 ter is the Surmulot of BufFon, the Wanderratte of the Germans, 

 the Mus decumanus of Pallas. It has been transported in our 

 day by the Nadejda to Kamtschatka ; in fact, it might be adopted 

 as the appropriate ensign of commerce, and we might safely say 

 that a place without the brown rat is a place destitute of com- 

 merce. On the contrary, the larger animals always retire, and 

 finally become extinct, a proof that the issue of the contest be- 

 tween man, and any animal, whatever be his strength and cour- 

 age, is always in favour of the lord of creation. It is thus that 

 the lion, which, according to Herodotus and Aristotle, still 

 existed in their times in Macedonia, after having for a long 

 time occupied Asia-Minor and Syria, is now-a-days repelled from 

 the frontiers of Persia and India, into some desert portions of 

 Arabia, and is dominant solely in Africa. So, too, the crocodile 

 no longer exists in Lower Egypt ; and the hippopotamus and 

 cameleopard, and other colossal animals, have retreated into the 

 interior of Africa. But there are likewise species of animals 

 which have been completely extirpated even within the period of 

 historic records. Thus the urus of the ancients, which, in the 

 time of Caesar, was common in Germany, no longer existed there 

 in the sixteenth century. And the sea-cow of the Kamtschatka 

 seas has a still shorter history. In fact it was only towards the 

 commencement of the eighteenth century that it was observed, 



