loo SORICID.E— SOREX 



a trap, which, in fact, at least in my own experience, is likely 

 to be very successful if placed in the most open and con- 

 spicuous position available. 



It is an old observation often repeated, that dogs and cats, 

 although they kill, will not readily eat the Common Shrew, and 

 their aversion may probably arise quite as much from the early 

 putrefaction undergone by a shrew carcase, as from the rank 

 musky odour which the species possesses. This odour, although 

 not usually emitted except under the influence of fright, may 

 also have been in some measure the cause of the ancient pre- 

 judices concerning its supposed power of inflicting injury by 

 the mere contact of its body. On the other hand, examinations 

 of the "pellets" or regurgitations of owls and other birds 

 have long since ^ established the fact that they make no such 

 nice discriminations, and that they destroy numbers of shrews ; 

 and it is certain also that carnivorous mammals will occasionally 

 eat them. 



The unfortunate creature was formerly the centre of a whole 

 host of extravagant superstitions, which, like all ignorant pre- 

 judices, disappear but slowly from our midst, and probably still 

 linger in the more inaccessible parts of the country. Its very 

 name is an indelible brand of malignancy and spite, and must 

 have owed its existence to centuries of misapprehension in 

 many lands. From the time of Aristotle, who declared that 

 its bite is dangerous to horses and other draught animals, and 

 produces boils,^ its presence has been regarded as something 

 peculiarly noxious, so that a variety of the most extraordinary 

 remedies and preventatives occur in the works of ancient 

 writers. In England it was believed by running over an 

 animal to produce lameness and even disease. Thus it was 

 described in an old book * as the " Shrew or Shrew-mouse, 



' Pellets seem to have been first examined by Henry Turner, of the Botanic 

 Garden at Bury St Edmunds, who published his conclusions in 1832 (see Loudon's 

 Mag. Nat. Hist., v., 727). Adams had a dead shrew brought to him from a magpie's 

 nest, and has known trapped specimens to be eaten by Evotomys. J. E. Harting 

 took one from the stomach of a stone curlew (^Vermin of the Farm, 1892, 22). 



^ Historia Animalium, viii., 24, D'A. W. Thompson's ed., 1910, 604', 19. For 

 Holland's translation of Pliny and Somner's version, see above, p. 85. 



8 New World of Words : or. Universal English Dictionary, 6th edition, London, 

 1706, a revised version of The Moderne World of Words, or a Universal English 

 Dictionary, collected from the best authors by E. P. (Edward Phillips : ist ed., 1696). 



