242 Scraps in Natural History. 



rently only when hungry, and it allowed itself to be handled with 

 freedom. Shortly after, perhaps a week, one of the others was 

 purchased and placed in the same room, about which they now 

 ran in perfect amity, gamboling and playing together like kittens. 

 I fed them with meat, Unios and Helices, which they ate either 

 raw or cooked. They would often, as I entered the apartment, 

 run toward me, and frisk about my feet ; and always obeyed my 

 call. Living mice were seized by them, and hugged with all 

 their feet and legs, while with the mouth they bit fiercely all 

 along the spine in rapid succession, and then they attacked the 

 head and other parts of the body, the whole process being the 

 work of a moment. 



When they were about a month old, I enfeebled a large and 

 veteran brown rat by almost suffocating him under water, and 

 placed him in their view ; they immediately scampered off in 

 evident affright. Maiming the rat by sundry blows upon his 

 head, he was fastened in an empty box with the weasels ; these, 

 dashing furiously but vainly against the glass lid to effect their 

 escape, at last huddled together in a remote corner, while the rat, 

 with seeming gravity and unconcern, sat motionless at the other 

 side of the box, the weasels still manifesting great trepidation. 

 I then shook them together, when the rat bit one of the weasels 

 on the back so as totally to paralyze its hind legs ; and the other 

 weasel, escaping immediately from the box without a wound, 

 was thrown into violent but transient convulsions. For these 

 spasmodic attacks, renewed at short intervals for perhaps twenty 

 minutes, I can assign no other cause than extreme terror. The 

 bitten weasel refused to eat, became rapidly emaciated, and soon 

 died. The other, not feeling himself safe even in the wide room, 

 with such a mortal enemy, jumped out of a second story win- 

 dow, and ran away. 



Rats and Mice. — A correspondent of the Penny Magazine, 

 Part XI, attempts to prove that mice have no instinctive fear of 

 the cat, by the fact, that having caught a mouse in a secluded 

 part of one of the coal mines of England, — a mine into which a 

 cat had never been introduced, — he placed it in a glass lantern, 

 and after several days admitted a cat into the room ; the cat 

 rushed toward the imprisoned mouse with " dire intent," but the 

 mouse, perfectly indifferent to its fury, proceeded with its ablu- 

 tions. 



