HISTORY OF THE HOUSE RAT 
wild mice often come into houses for a time, but desert them as 
soon as house mice arrive. Its bodily and mental activity are 
both noteworthy; it is as ingenious as it is curious, will leap 
long distances and run up vertical walls, so that it is extremely 
difficult to put things out of its reach. Its acuteness has been 
the theme of many anecdotes, and its attentiveness to musical 
sounds and ability to make them are well known. It is not 
surprising, then, that the mouse should figure largely in the folk- 
lore and fables of all peoples. 
Equally domesticated and even less welcome are the big 
gray brown, blunt-nosed rats of cellars, ships, warehouses, 
granaries, and grain fields all over the world. So 
completely have they allied themselves with man 
and his works that their primitive home is unknown, but is 
thought to be Mongolia. The advent of this rat in Europe, 
and its dispersion thence by shipping to all parts of the globe, 
are more recent than is generally assumed, since rats first be- 
came noticeable in southern Russia by migrating from the East 
in large numbers and swimming the Volga. The immigrants 
then spread rapidly over Europe, reaching London about 
1730, —‘‘the only wild animal,” remarks Boyd Dawkins,® 
“which is known to have invaded Europe since the Pleistocene 
Age, with the exception, perhaps, of the true elk.” 
Rats. 
Wherever it went it overcame and partly exterminated the smaller, more 
timid black house rat, now very scarce — itself a world-wide wanderer 
in the paths of commerce. The popular belief in Great Britain that the 
brown rat was introduced there in Norwegian timber ships, gives it the name 
“Norway rat”; at any rate, European ships carried it to all parts of the 
world. It reached our eastern ports in 1775 and was popularly credited 
to the hated Hessian soldiers, —a queer echo of the London idea that it 
came there with the Hanoverian train of the present reigning house. By 
1830 it had reached the Mississippi, and by 1857, at least, was numerous 
in California. 
Long previous (1554, according to Erxleben) the European black rat 
had established itself in the eastern states; and also (in the South) a white- 
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