Norway Rat 



Colour yellowish-brown thickly Interspersed with long black 

 hairs, grayer on the sides and grayish-white below, feet 

 whitish. Tail very sparsely haired with the scales very con- 

 spicuous, ears dull brown. Young dull gray with no brown 

 tints. (Illustration facing p. i4i.) 

 Range. Cosmopolitan. Introduced into America from Europe. 



In many ways mice are our benefactors in a degree not 

 often suspected, perhaps even enough to offset much of the 

 trouble they cause by stealing. 



With rats it seems to be different. These troublesome brutes 

 may be useful in a way as scavengers, but the good that they 

 do in this way or in any other, is constantly overshadowed by the 

 damage wrought by them in hundred ways, and they are 

 probably as little beloved by man as any beast that lives. 



They appear to be on an entirely different scale from mice. 

 It is not altogether a matter of size, a brown rat reduced 

 to a mouse's dimensions would still be coarse and rough and 

 unattractive. 



They copy in a general way the colour and proportions of 

 a mouse, because the lives of the two are really very much 

 alike; living as they do in the character of humble dependents 

 on man's production, in obscure out-of-the-way corners, where 

 a dust-coloured coat has proved most useful. 



But the fur of a full-grown rat is at all seasons harsh and 

 lifeless; the expression of its eyes is apt to be dull and hate- 

 ful, in fact, there is hardly an attractive feature that rats may 

 be said to possess. 



It would be useless to deny that rats are extremely intelli- 

 gent, and careful witnesses have always given them credit for 

 looking after any helpless member of their family, old or young. 



For my part I have seen but little to like or admire about 

 them, though I am not sensible of any personal antipathy 

 toward them, such as many feel for both rats and mice. 



The black and white rats which make such amusing pets 

 belong to a different species than the common brown rat. 



I believe that they are varieties of the old black rat, a 

 gentler and much more likable race that is said to have been 

 partly driven out of its native land by the other, and at pres- 

 ent only to be found in numbers in such scattered corners of 

 the world as the brown rats have not yet found. I have never 



