RELATIONSHIP OF THE FAUNA. 79 



corded; the black rat, as elsewhere, is rapidly disappearing, 

 and is now on the verge of extinction. There is little reason 

 to doubt that some, and possibly all, of these forms were trans- 

 ported to the islands in the holds of vessels, just as they have 

 been carried from Europe to America, but no absolute date can 

 be fixed for the first rat visitation. If the accounts of Jourdan 

 are to be credited, no rats were known prior to about 1610, 

 although only a few years later (1618) the islands appear to 

 have been largely overrun by the tree-rat, and to such an ex- 

 tent that, as Captain John Smith, in his History of Virginia, 

 says, " there was no island but it was pestered with them ; and 

 some fishes have been taken with rats in their bellies, which 

 thej' caught in swimming from ile to ile; their nests had 

 almost in every tree, and in most places their burrowes in the 

 ground like conies; they spared not the fruits of the plants, or 

 trees, nor the very plants themselves, but ate them up " (Jones, 

 p. 158). This great abundance, as Matthew Jones well remarks, 

 points to a much earlier colonization than the purely historicul 

 data indicate, allowing even for the most rapid development 

 that these animals are capable of. It would, indeed, be some- 

 what surprising if these animals had not made an earlier ap- 

 pearance, for it can be readily conceived that at least some 

 individuals, more particularly of the tree-rat, would have found 

 their way over, if not through the agency of vessels, on the 

 drift timber which must at times have I'eached the islands. 

 The narrative of Americus Vespucius, as bearing upon the 

 islands of Fernando de Noronha, is interesting in this connec- 

 tion, since it shows that these islands, which lie directly in the 

 line of the w&stward-sweeping equatorial currents, were in- 

 habited by a form of big rat as early as 1503, the year of 

 Vespucius's fourth voyage. How and whence this animal 

 came to the islands it is impossible to say, but not unlikely, 

 as has been suggested by Mr. Wallace and Prof. Branner,* it, 

 together with a species of amphisbsenian, may have been cur- 

 rentally distributed from Western Africa, a supposition that 



*Branner, Fauna of tlie Islands of Fernando de Noronha — Amer. Naturalist, 

 Oct.,1888, p. 871. 



