THE LONG-TAILED FIELD MOUSE. 337 



is attributed to drought."* Arnobius has made particular 

 mention of the ravages of mice. " Glance through the various 

 annals written in different languages, and you will learn that all 

 countries have frequently been desolated by them and abandoned 

 by their cultivators. Every kind of produce is attacked and 

 eaten by mice arid locusts. Pass through your own histories 

 [end of the third century], and you will be informed how the 

 former age has been affected by these pests, and brought to the 

 miseries of poverty." And again he says, "in Syria mice and 

 locusts have abounded prodigiously, "f It is said that Helgay, a 

 village three miles from Downham in Norfolk, " is once in three 

 or four years infested with an incredible number of field mice j 

 but whenever this visitation occurs, a prodigious number of owls 

 are sure to arrive and tarry till they have destroyed these mis- 

 chievous little animals."J I* 1 * ne Annual Register for 1773, it is 

 stated, that in September of that year, the villages of Putsch- 

 witz, Kleinbautzen, Walswitz, Gleinin, and Kannewitz, about 

 a mile distant from Bautsen, were reduced to a most deplorable 

 state by the field mice having devoured all the produce of the 

 soil. Gilbert White says in his diary, " The mice have infested 

 my garden much by nestling in my hot-beds, devouring my 

 balsams, and burrowing under my cucumber-basins ; so that I 

 may say with Martial : 



Fines mus populator, et colono 

 Tanquam sus Calydonius timetur," 



" In May and June, 1832, the shepherds' dogs were inces- 

 santly killing mice, over a great extent of mountainous district, 

 including all the western divisions of Inverness-shire and Ross- 

 shire. The shepherds observed that these mice increased as 

 the summer advanced -, and that the grassy parts of the moun- 

 tains were much destroyed by them, and became brown. The 

 manager of Mr. Frazer's sheep-farms at Eskdale, says that, as 

 near as he could estimate, they devoured about sixty-four 

 bushels of his potatoes ; and that he dug out of one hole no 



* Nat. Hist. viii. 29 ; x. 65. f Disp. contra Gentes, i. 2 et 5. 



J Mirror (1836), vol. xxviii. p. 458. 



