MAMMALS WAITE. 171 



driven by fire. Arundel 2 describes the rats of Sydney Island as 

 naturally living in the ground and roots of trees, but gathering 

 round the dwellings as soon as a settlement is formed. 



As elsewhere, the great enemy of the native rat is the common 

 brown rat of Europe, introduced by ships throughout the world. 

 Its depredations are such that Gill states that in many of the 

 islands the indigenous breed has been exterminated by the 

 imported rat. Some idea of the successful war waged by the 

 introduced rat may be gathered from the following graphic 

 account by the same writer 9 : " In 1852 a solitary male Norway 

 rat got ashore at Mangaia from the wreck of an American 

 whaler. It made war upon the native rat, so that one of the bed- 

 rooms of the mission-house became uninhabitable. On removing 

 the flooring about thirty dead native rats were found. We 

 caught the offender in a trap." 



Writing of Raratonga, another island of the Cook Group, the 

 same author 11 incidentally records how the native rat has been 

 subjected to even more deadly onslaught, being almost exter- 

 minated by the domestic cats which, originally introduced by 

 missionaries and afterwards emigrating to the bush, took to 

 hunting birds when rats became scarce. 



On p. 59 of the present Memoir we read : " Cats have long 

 been introduced, they are known to the natives by the name of 

 ' pussy,' and have proved of service in destroying the brown rat, 

 formerly a great pest to the Islands." Dieffenbach, 6 writing on 

 New Zealand, states that the cat often runs wild and is another 

 cause of the extermination of indigenous animals. 



The natives themselves destroy the rats : first, as vermin ; 

 second, shooting them for sport ; third, killing them for food. 



When unchecked, rats became very numerous on some of the 

 islands. Writing of Sydney Island, Arundel 2 mentions how on 

 moonlight nights he has often seen hundreds of rats gathered 

 together round the native quarters feeding upon waste rice, bread, 

 pieces of fish, etc., thrown out. He adds that they frequently 

 caught one hundred a night in tubs made into traps in the store. 



In Mangaia they were also numerous, for Gill 9 states that, like 

 most of the Pacific Islands, it was literally overrun with rats, and 

 describes how a large bottle-shaped hole was dug in the earth and 

 baited with candle-nuts, adding that when the hole was pretty 

 well filled with rats, two men would go down with knobbed 

 sticks to kill them. A hole which would contain two men 

 would accommodate a goodly number of rats ! If the Mangaian 

 rats were equally vicious with those mentioned by Peale, rat- 

 killing under such conditions would not be unattended by danger, 

 for he states that the animal resists pertinaciously and bites 

 severely. 



