THE BROWN OR COMMON RAT 629 



tended by their mother alone, who will carry them out of reach 

 of danger, like other rodents, in her mouth.^ An instance is 

 recorded of a female, caught in a trap by one forefoot, gathering 

 a nest of grass together for her six newly-born young.^ 



Space does not permit a description of the various methods 

 of rat-catching,* which, as mentioned on p. 583, is an art 

 of quite respectable antiquity. Black Rats or Common Rats, 

 according to the period, figure quite frequently in Acts of 

 Parliament, churchwardens' accounts, parish registers, and other 

 documents. 



Rats are popularly supposed to desert in a body a sinking 

 ship,* or a building, when any ruinous injury exists in the 

 masonry. There seems to be no definite evidence of these 

 supposed facts, but unquestionably the movements or migra- 

 tions of rats are largely governed by questions of food supply. 



One generally supposes that rats find their way about by 

 the exercise in an acute degree of the ordinary mammalian 

 senses of sight, touch, hearing, and smell, but some experiments 

 recendy undertaken in the biological laboratory of Chicago ° 

 suggest that they possess a special motor sense of which human 

 beings can have little, if any, cognisance, being independent of 

 sight, smell, or hearing. The whiskers are an important, 

 but not an essential, factor, since, although disturbed temporarily 

 by the removal of the whiskers, the rats were forty-eight hours 

 after the removal perfectly capable of finding their way about 

 without them. 



Rats make very attractive and amusing pets.® As shown 

 above (p. 617) most, if not all, of the existing domestic breeds 



1 Eight young were seen thus transported by E. Cowley, Field, i8th March igii, 

 538 ; Steele Elliot, Journ. Birmingham Nat. Hist, and Phil. Soc, March to April 

 1896, ii,, 17, saw mouse-sized young similarly transported. 



" A. B. Hemsworth, Zoologist, 1848, 2132. 



^ In addition to the works of Smith and Swaine, cited on pp. 583-584, see 

 Matthew's Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher, 1898; H. C. Barkley's 5/«</?^j 

 in the Art of Rat-catching j James Rodwell's The Rat: its History and Destructive 

 Character; Frank Buckland's essay on Rats, loc. cit. supra; and other works. 



* See quotation from The Tempest, at p. 578 (Terminology). 



' Field, 27th June 1908, 11 17. 



° Perhaps tamed in Japan first, vide Bingley, 253. Some of the Japanese tame 

 these animals, and teach them to perform many entertaining tricks ; and thus 

 instructed, they are exhibited as a show for the diversion of the people (Kaempfer's 

 Japan, i. 126). 



