House Mouse 



brown, especially on the face and shoulders, dusky on the back; be- 

 low paler gray, sometimes suffused with buff. (Illustration facing 

 p. 141.) 

 Range. Cosmopolitan. Introduced into America from the Old World. 



I have in another place alluded to the house mouse as a 

 foreigner; but, as a matter of fact, it is no more of a foreigner 

 than are the descendants of the very first settlers in this country, 

 English or Dutch. Its ancestors came across with the earliest of 

 them, and while the white people were still but campers and 

 squatters on the borders of a bewildering forest of unknown 

 extent the youngest of these little hangers-on could already count 

 grand-parents and great grand-parents of American birth, so that 

 reckoning by generations there were even then American mice. 



Still, it would hardly be safe to conclude that all or even 

 any considerable portion of the mice that inhabit our dwellings at 

 present are descended from these first- comers. 



Immigration and emigration have proved as popular among 

 them as with members of the human race, and every ship that 

 crosses the Atlantic bears, among other things, its humble cargo 

 of mice from one shore to the other, so that some of those 

 which even now are nibbling at our pastry or the bindings of 

 books may very possibly have spent the first part of the season in 

 England or on the Continent, and just as possibly will be there 

 again next year. 



Mice were originally natives of Southern Asia. From there 

 they have accompanied man in his wanderings to all parts of 

 the world, travelling, as he has travelled, in ox-teams and on 

 the backs of donkeys, by steamship and railway; taking up their 

 quarters wherever he does, first in log cabins with thatched 

 roofs, and finally, in some instances, on the nineteenth floor of 

 a steel building where generation after generation may live and 

 die in turn without having so much as touched foot to the 

 earth. 



Strangely enough the race seems to be proof against the 

 changes wrought upon most animals by difference of environment. 

 Specimens from the opposite sides of the globe, or from widely 

 separated latitudes, are said to be practically indistinguishable, as 

 if at last the species had hit upon a style of form and colouring, 

 perfectly suited to all conditions of life. 



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