584 MURID^— EPIMYS 



Black Rat as in his day living in ceilings and wainscots, the " Norway 

 Rats " in shores and sewers. He relates how he at one house caught 

 the latter in the cellars, but in the upper part of the house nothing but 

 Black Rats ; he put all together in a great cage, intending to show them 

 to his employer in the morning, but the Norway Rats promptly killed 

 and devoured the Black Rats in his presence. Thomas Swaine, in 

 The Vermin Catcher, 1783, states that in the fifteen counties in which 

 he worked he never met Black Rats except in Bucks — a few in High 

 Wycombe — and Middlesex ; while in the city of London he found very 

 few Norway Rats, but quantities of Black Rats. He thought the 

 Norway Rats came from the shipping in the Port of London, and 

 dispersed to country districts, where they were better able to master 

 the Black Rats. In 1776 Pennant {Brit. Zool., i., loi) noted that "the 

 Norway rat has also greatly lessened their numbers, and in many 

 places almost extirpated them " ; and Goldsmith {Nat. Hist., iv.,66, 1776) 

 referred to it as "the Common Rat, as it was once called, but now 

 common no longer." 



Donovan (1820) speaks of it familiarly — and he observed the 

 expulsion from a house in London of a numerous colony by Brown 

 Rats. Frank Buckland quotes a passage showing that about 1850, 

 certain of the older granaries of the Metropolis were still tenanted by 

 this species, and in Bell's ed. ii. (303) it is said that they could still be 

 found in old houses in London^and Edinburgh; but Macgillivray stated 

 in 1838 that he had not seen a specimen captured in the latter city 

 within the preceding fifteen years. About i860 it "was not rare in 

 Warwickshire, but we now doubt the possibility of obtaining a single 

 example " (Bell, ed. ii., 303). It is said to have recently existed in 

 Westmoreland in small numbers about fell-side farms (J. Goodchild, 

 Lakeland, 80, 1883), and it was reported from parts of Cheshire as still 

 not uncommon in 1890 (Coward and Oldham). No doubt many whose 

 memories went back to the second quarter of the nineteenth century 

 could recall unexterminated colonies of Black Rats ; but the identifica- 

 tion cannot always be trusted, for in many cases there has been 

 confusion with hibernicus, the black race of the Brown Rat. For an 

 account of these various records, see Harting {Field, 26th July 1879, 

 144; and Essays on Sport and Nat. Hist., 156-170, 1883) and Millais 

 (ii., 207). 



As regards rural Scotland, it was described in 181 3 as the only 

 species met with in Forfar, and as being not rare in all the inland 

 districts of Angusshire (Don, Appendix, 38 ; in Hendrick, Agriculture 

 of Forfar). They were common in Aberdeenshire until about 1830. 

 The Rev. G. Gordon sent specimens from Elgin, where, however, it was 



1 Mr Cocks has called our attention to the discovery of a colony in 1875 in a 

 house on Cornhill, London ; see also Land and Water, May 1874, 399. 



