582 MURID^— EPIMYS 



The Irish practice of satirising or rhyming rats (and other animals) 

 to death was frequently mentioned in the seventeenth century, starting, 

 perhaps, with Scott's Discoverie of Witchcraft (i 584). Thus Shakespeare 

 made Rosalind say, in As You Like It, Act iii., sc. 2 : " I was never 

 so be-rhimed that I can remember since Pythagoras's time, when I 

 was an Irish rat " ; and the same idea is found in Ben Jonson's Poetaster 

 (address to the reader; 1601): "Rhime them to death as they do 

 Irish Rats"; in the same author's Staple of News (1625) ; in Randolph's 

 Jealous Lovers (1646); Flecknoe's Characters (1665); and doubtless 

 numerous other references could be given. 



E. rattus is undoubtedly of Eastern origin. There is no clear 

 evidence of its presence in Europe during the historic period prior 

 to the Crusades (1095, 1147, and 1191); on the other hand, as shown 

 above, the species was firmly established in western Europe shortly after 

 those events, and there can be little doubt that it was imported by 

 the navies of the Crusaders. De I'lsle's researches led him to believe 

 that the Alexandrine^ Rat was the parent source of the European 

 Black Rat. He supposed that in the seventh century the " Alexandrine 

 Rat " was still living a free life on the deserts of Arabia, because if it 

 had been parasitic on man in the Near East at that time the torrent 

 of Arab invasion would have brought it to Europe, whereas it did not 

 appear in Europe until three or four centuries later. Subsequently it 

 acquired parasitic habits, and it spread through Palestine, Egypt, and 

 North Africa. From the Levant the ships of the Crusaders carried 

 it to the northern shores of the Mediterranean, where it received a 

 variety of names. The modern Greeks called it ■kovtiko's, the Venetians 

 pantegana, in each case in allusion to its arrival by sea ; the Genoese 

 named it Topo (a modification of Taipei), which is still used in Italy ; 

 the Romans called it Sorco (from Sorex); finally, in Provence, where 

 the word rata was used as the name of the House Mouse, it received 

 the name rat, and this Provencal name, as the animal spread into the 

 cities of other Western peoples, followed it into all the languages of 

 western Europe. 



According to de I'lsle, the pioneer rats must have had brown backs 

 and light bellies, and in Italy and Iberia this colour has been retained. 

 Northwards of the Mediterranean region the brown pelage was changed, 

 partly by climatic influences (as supposed by de I'lsle) and partly 

 because of alimentary changes (according to Fatio), into a black one. 

 This change cannot have taken longer than three centuries, or more 

 than 900 generations of rats, to effect,^ for Georgius Agricbla {De 

 Animant. subterran., 1530, ed. 1657, 485) described the rat as " Mus 



1 De risle meant the form called E. r. frugivorus below ; see p. 595, footnote i. 

 ^ If, as seems probable, the race arose as a Mendelian mutation (see under 

 Geographical variation), the change was probably effected in a much shorter period. 



