R A T. 



629 



habits of the people have become more cleanly, and 

 not by any means that the one species of rat has 

 eaten up the other. In wild nature, the attack of 

 animal upon animal is never carried on to extermina- 

 tion even as between prey and preyer. On the 

 <'ontrary, they appear to increase and decrease to- 

 gether. The lions of western Africa prey upon the 

 antelopes and the quaggas, but these animals never 

 fall off much from the usual average of their numbers ; 

 and if the state of things with regard to any other 

 preyers and prey in any other place is examined, it 

 will load to the very same conclusion. Any other 

 means would not do. The prey may exist without 

 the preyer, and under that state of things its numbers 

 may increase farther than they do in free nature ; but 

 the preyer cannot possibly exist without the prey. 



We have preferred making these comparisons of 

 the two species of British house-rats here rather than 

 in the notices of them as species, because here we 

 can refer to both with equal ease and without repe- 

 tition. The comparison is necessary in order to a 

 right understanding of the animals ; and from their 

 numbers, and the frequence of their appearance, to 

 say nothing of their boldness, their briskness, and the 

 services which they perform, rats are among- the 

 most interesting- of all our wiW mammalia. Their 

 history is also both old and familiar ; and this is one 

 of the reasons which renders a clear distinction be- 



purpose of concealing what they themselves do in 

 private society, just as the idolatrous Jews beat 

 drums, and made all other sorts of din, in order to 

 drown the cries of their helpless children which they 

 were burning in sacrifice to Moloch in the valley of 

 Itimmon, in the vain hope that they would thereby 

 procure pardon for their own sins. 



Even granting the truth of the story upon which 

 this name of ratting is founded, there is very great 

 injustice done to the rats. Admitting that they quit 

 the house previous to its fall, their so quitting it does 

 not tend, in any way, to accelerate the said fall ; for 

 rats, though they may take up their residence in a 

 house, and thus be in some sort members of the 

 household, never, in any way, contribute to the stabi- 

 lity of the house, or in thg least help one house in 

 the demolition of another. Upon this plain and 

 simple ground, therefore, the epithet "ratting," as 

 applied to an influential member of one party going 

 over to the opposite party, is a misnomer. If the 

 word is to be used at all, it should be applied only to 

 those hangers-on upon a party which live at its 

 expense, and render it no support in return ; and the 

 " ratting" of such is, under all circumstances, an ad- 

 vantage. 



But the fact that rats do leave a house, in anticipa- 

 tion of its fall, is not only untrue, but impossible. 

 There are no means of what we call anticipation 



twerm the two so very desirable, the old history being possessed by any animal ; and the belief that there 

 wholly that of the black rat, and the current history j are, belongs to the very worst species of superstitious 

 mpletely that of the brown one. 



It would have been singular, if so bold, sharp- 

 looking, and strong and daring an animal as a rat 

 is, and so familiar as people must have been with it 

 from the earliest time at which their houses could 

 shelter and feed a rat, had escaped without having 

 some marvellous story fastened upon it ; and sup- 

 posing the story to exist, it would have been still 

 more wonderful if some writer about animals, full and 

 overflowing as a fountain with the most ready, willing, 

 and universal belief, had not given the public the 

 benefit of the story with a certificate of its truth. 



The story that rats anticipate the fall of a house, 

 and take their departure while yet they can do it 

 v, ith safety, is one of the most current stories in the 

 whole old coin of speech. So generally and so rea- 

 dily has it been believed, that it is made the founda- 

 tion of the common name of all changes of party and 

 opinion, all tergiversations when taken in the bad 

 sense, and especially in those of a political nature. 

 Tergiversation of this kind, more especially when it 

 consists in deserting one party in its weakness, and 

 4 over to the opposite one, in its strength, for 

 the sake of personal advantage, is invariably called 

 " RATTING ; " and it is held, and very properly held, 

 to be the worst species of political crime of which a 

 public man can be guilty, and characteristic of the 

 very meanest cast of mind and lowest depth of poli- 

 tical corruption. In private life there is probably a 

 great deal more of this ratting than in public life, for 

 it is the way of the world, to use an every-day pro- 

 verb, that a man can always find plenty of friends 

 when he does not need them, but few or none when 

 he really does. The prevalence of this, even to " a 

 beam," in the eye of the generality of men in private 

 liv.x, ought to make them a little forbearing in the 

 matter of the " mote" of political ratting ; but it does 

 not ; and it is possible that men make much of their 

 outcry and noise on political subjects merely for the 



NAT. HIST. VOL. III. 



delusion, and is one of the very worst parts of it. 

 Animals, being more completely under the influence 

 of natural circumstances than we are, are very often 

 sooner affected by changes ; but still the change 

 must happen before it can possibly aft'ect the animal, 

 whether it happens to such a degree as affects us or 

 not. To suppose that an animal, which shows not 

 the least symptom of ever proceeding upon the 

 precepts of cause and effect, can be affected by any 

 change or event whatever, before that event happens, 

 is just about as absurd as to say that an animal could 

 be shot with a leaden bullet, while that bullet 

 remains as galena, in sulphate of lead, in an un- 

 opened part of Minera or Halkin mountain. It i* 

 even something worse than that ; for it is de facto. 

 making a god of the animal, endowing it with the 

 power of knowing without any means of knowledge. 

 It is astonishing how much language is made the 

 source of the most mischievous of all errors, by the 

 working of these dogmas of superstition into it. 



Granting that a rat were the most sensitive of all 

 animals to coming changes, and that it felt them 

 in the very dawn and twilight of their existence, the 

 fall of a house does not come within the class or' 

 which its sensi-bility would give it this early warning, 

 Whatever these are, they must be all purely natural ; 

 and though the fall of a house cannot be called an 

 operation of art, it is an operation which could not be 

 produced unless art had been previously employed 

 in building the house, and it is an operation which 

 art, judiciously applied in the repairing of the house, 

 could have prevented. The cause of the fall, there- 

 fore, belongs to the category of art, not to that of 

 nature. 



It follows, as a necessary consequence of this, that, 

 if rats quit a house in anticipation of its fall, they 

 must understand what are the frail parts of it ; and, 

 by understanding this, they must, of necessity, under- 

 stand how it could be repaired, and the fall pre- 

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