304 THE GRAY RAT. 



rat population of Great Britain and Ireland to be 

 equivalent to one rat for every human being ; but 

 this would seem to me a very conservative estimate. 

 A large number of dwelling-houses harbour many 

 more rats than they do human beings ; farms, 

 especially those having rick-yards attached, retain 

 a rat retinue which outnumbers its human in- 

 habitants by at least ten, and possibly fifty, to one. 

 In our cities the walls of many human dwellings, 

 and of every factory, storehouse, and warehouse, 

 harbour rats, while the animals congregate in 

 thousands about slaughter-houses, refuse-dumps, 

 and the like, to say nothing of the hordes that 

 dwell in the underground sewers and culverts. It 

 would seem, then, that the rat population of our 

 urban areas far outnumbers the human population, 

 and I have no doubt whatever that the balance in 

 favour of the rat is even more marked in country 

 areas, agricultural or otherwise. In many cases the 

 rat population of a single barn would exceed the 

 human inhabitants of the whole village ; then we 

 have the numerous rats living remote from man's 

 habitations, in stream and hedge banks, together 

 with those that take up their quarters in isolated 

 barns. Two hundred millions would probably be 

 a more accurate estimate of the rat population of 

 Great Britain and Ireland ; but taking it at Dr 

 Shipley's conservative estimate of forty millions, and 

 accepting the previous authority's calculation that 

 each rat costs the country 7s. 6d. per annum, we 

 are annually paying this creature the handsome 

 sum of 15,000,000 for living in our midst ! Dr 

 Shipley himself reckons the damage done by rats 

 as amounting to 10,000,000 annually, while Sir 

 James Crichton- Brown's calculations agree with 

 the sum of 15,000,000. In all probability only 



