264 THE FIELD MOUSE. 



this method, I desired that all the animals caught 

 in the traps might be brought to me ; and I was 

 greatly astonished when I found that more than a 

 hundred were taken every day, in a piece of land 

 consisting dnly of about forty acres. I obtained in 

 this manner more than two thousand, in the course 

 of twenty-three days, from the fifteenth of Novem- 

 ber to the eighth of December. Their numbers 

 afterwards decreased gradually, till the hard frosts 

 commenced, when the remaining animals retired to 

 their holes, to feed upon what they had collected*." 

 In some parts of the continent, the multitudes of 

 Field Mice have occasionally been so immense as to 

 plunder whole districts, leaving scarcely any thing 

 that was eatable, either in the gardens or fields. 

 Muschenbroek has related, that they were so nu- 

 merous in Holland, in the year 1742, that one pea- 

 sant killed in his fields betwixt five and six thou- 

 sand. This scourge is the more terrible, since it 

 frequently happens that every attention, and every 

 imaginable stratagem, are insufficient to destroy 

 them, till the violent rains set in, which often thin 

 their numbers, by drowning them in thousands at a 

 time. The rains, however, sometimes come too 

 late for the farmer, and then, instead of the crops 

 of corn which he had reasonably looked forward 

 to, he has nothing to reap but a wreck of the straw. 



* Buffon par Sonnini, xxv. p. 208, 209. 



It 



