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. 
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. | have never 
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