WILD CREATURES OF GARDEN AND HEDGEROW 



took to robbing people for a livelihood, but 

 spread even farther than its cousin the black 

 rat, and in many countries drove its forerunner 

 completely away ! So any evening when you 

 are out in the garden or by the poultry pens, 

 and see one of these thieves of the night scamper 

 off, remember how it is that the scoundrel 

 comes to be there, and that he is not one of our 

 truly native creatures, like the field mice, black- 

 birds, thrushes, robins, and wrens, but an invader 

 from over the seas, who has nothing to recom- 

 mend him except the cleverness with which 

 he raids and robs. When all is said and done, 

 the common brown rat is one of the most 

 intelligent of animals, for it is to his wits that 

 he owes his great success in the battle for 

 existence, in which he has not only wild animal 

 foes to fight, but we people out of whom he 

 gets his living. So, however big a scoundrel 

 he may be, I must close this account of rats 

 by paying my respects to the cunning, un- 

 scrupulous, and most successful brown rat. 



(The Brown Rat until comparatively recently has 

 been known to science as Mus decumanus or norvegicus, 

 but in Miller's Catalogue of the Mammals of Western 

 Europe (British Museum, N.H., 1912) it becomes 

 Epimys norvegicus. The Black Rat, the Mus rattus 

 190 



