210 



When the two halves of the funnel are brought together this spout or 

 tube is occupied by the line or hawser to be protected, and by lashing 

 this tube to the hawser the funnel is held in position and prevented 

 from lying down. Such a funnel should be put on every line from the 

 vessel to the dock, and when the tube does not fit the line the latter 

 should be parceled before the tube is lashed to it. 



These, together with raising the gang plank from the dock at night, 

 make up the precautions ordinarily taken to prevent the rats from 

 getting on ships. As stated above, they are based on the assump- 

 tion that these are the common avenues of entrance. That these 

 precautions do much good can not be doubted, but in the writer's 

 opinion they do not entirely cover the case, for there remains one 

 other road of ingress, one of the important, if not the most im- 

 portant, which these precautions do not and can not block and 

 through which rats constantly get on board, and that is through the 

 medium of the cargo itself. There is at present nothing to prevent 

 access in this manner to a vessel and the route is so easy that there 

 can be no doubt that whole families of rats are carried on board in 

 this way. In fact some articles of cargo offer inviting harbors and 

 homes to rats, particularly when these articles have been stored for 

 a time in rat-infested warehouses. Among such articles of cargo 

 may be mentioned crockery or china packed in hay or straw or ex- 

 celsior and loosely crated ; various articles of furniture packed in ex- 

 celsior, wrapped in gunny, and loosely crated; wheat, corn, oats, 

 peanuts, or barley when shipped in bags; and matting in hollow rolls* 

 when sewed up in gunny. Any of these articles could easily become 

 the home of even an entire rat family after having been stored for a 

 time prior to shipment in a rat-infested warehouse. As a matter of 

 fact, the last plague rat discovered in San Francisco was found in a 

 bag of peanuts on the third floor of a warehouse. 



That rats are thus carried on board is absolutely certain in my 

 opinion. In the recent antiplague campaign at San Francisco there 

 were ample opportunities for observations along this line, and in no 

 other way can the presence of rats in troublesome numbers on board 

 certain vessels be explained. These vessels were new, were freed 

 from rats by careful and repeated fumigation, and between these acts 

 touched at no wharves save in Honolulu and San Francisco, where 

 constant antirat precautions were observed. And yet on their second 

 trip (about five months after the fumigation had been discontinued) 

 they were badly rat-infested. Of course, by no means had all these 

 rats been carried on board in cargo, but the original patriarchs of the 

 colony had, after which, as is probably the case in all ratinfested ships, 

 their natural prolific characteristics did the rest. 



In the same way, too, rats are carried from ship to shore and the 

 truth of Kitasatso's aphorism that "wherever ships go, plague will go/' 



