146 MORE MINOR HORRORS 



leased for the sake of their rabbits to people 

 who had to give up the lease after the rats 

 had landed on them. Similar cases are known 

 off Denmark. They greedily eat birds' eggs, 

 and are said to convey them over consider- 

 able distances, though how they do this is 

 not very clear. After the destruction of the 

 vertebrate land-fauna, they fall back upon 

 the dwellers in the littoral, and live on prawns, 

 shrimps, and molluscs. They are very fond 

 of fish, and Lyddeker, in the 'Royal Natural 

 History,' states that they occasionally catch 

 and eat young eels. As their parasites show, 

 they eat insects such as the meal-beetle, 

 and when in the field they eat land-snails, 

 insect larvae, and other food, which conveys 

 into their bodies the same tape-worms, &c., 

 which we find in the hedgehog and in the 

 smaller carnivora. 



They are, in fact, omnivorous, and nothing 

 in the way of human food is alien to them. 

 They do enormous harm to corn-ricks and 

 to stored grain. They are inveterate enemies 

 of the hen-roost, the pigeon-house, and, as 

 we have ^een, of the rabbit-warren. When 

 pressed by hunger, they readily tiu:n cannibal, 

 and the brown rat easily masters the black. 

 There are stories of some few specimens of 

 each species being left in a cage overnight ; 

 on the following morning there were only 



