COMMON MOUSE. 299 



ducing ordinarily five or six young ones. In a fortnight 

 the young are able to leave the mother, and assume an 

 independent existence ; and at a very early age they also 

 reproduce. 



In addition to the usual means employed for their ex- 

 termination, such as traps of various kinds, and the 

 carnivorous instinct of the Cat, the Ferret, and the 

 Weasel, there still exists in Wales a custom so disgust- 

 ingly cruel, that the very mention of it would be scarcely 

 pardonable but for the possibility of thus producing 

 some degree of shame in the perpetrators of it, and con- 

 sequently saving some poor little Mice from being the 

 victims of such barbarity. It is customary in some parts 

 of Wales to roast a Mouse alive, hanging it before the 

 fire by its tail tied to a string, that its screams may scare 

 the rest from the house. 



It would be a useless expenditure of time and space to 

 give in detail the localities which this well-known and 

 widely diffused species is known to inhabit, but it may 

 not be uninteresting to mention some of those which are 

 most remote from its supposed native habitat. Dr. L. 

 Von Schrenck includes it in his Mammals of the Amoor 

 river. Mr. Darwin found it " living in short grass near 

 the summit of the Island of Ascension," and again "on 

 a small stony and arid island near Porto Pray a, the 

 capital of St. lago, in the Cape de Verde Islands," also 

 " on a grassy cliff on East Falkland Island." Mr. 

 Waterhouse, speaking of specimens from the above 

 localities, in his beautiful work on the Mammalia of the 

 voyage of the Beagle, says : " These specimens are all of 

 them rather less than full-grown individuals of the same 

 species procured in England/' We possess specimens col- 

 lected by Mr. Eraser in the Republic of Ecuador, which, 

 like the above-mentioned, are somewhat small in size. 



