187 

 NOTES AND QUERIES, 



MAMMALIA. 



Aristotle on Plagues of Field Mice. — Possibly some readers of 

 1 The Zoologist ' may not have compared the accounts recently published 

 of plagues of Field Voles in Scotland and Thessaly, with Aristotle's 

 description of similar occurrences more than two thousand years ago. The 

 comparison is most interesting, and the conclusion which Aristotle came to 

 was very much the same as that expressed by the Committee appointed by 

 the Board of Agriculture whose Report was published in the last number 

 of 'The Zoologist' (p. 121). The following extract is taken from the 

 translation of Aristotle's 'Natural History of Animals,' Bonn's edition 

 (p. 178): — " There is a doubt respecting the reproduction and destruction 

 of the Mice which live on the ground ; for such an inexpressible number 

 of Field Mice have sometimes made their appearance that very little food 

 remained. Their power of destruction, also, is so great that some small 

 farmers, having on one day observed that their corn was ready for harvest, 

 when they went the following day to cut their corn, found it all eaten. 

 The manner of their disappearance also is unaccountable ; for in a few days 

 they all vanish, although beforehand they could not be exterminated by 

 smoking and digging them out, nor by hunting them and turning swine 

 among them to root up their runs. Foxes also hunt them out, and wild 

 Weasels are very ready to destroy them ; but they cannot prevail over their 

 numbers and the rapidity of their increase ; nor indeed can anything 

 prevail over them but rain, and when this comes they disappear very soon." 

 — A. Holte Maopherson. 



[This passage will be found in the' Historia Animalium,'lib. vi., cap. 

 37, and it would be easy to supply references to other classical authors who 

 have made allusion to the damage caused by Field Mice (Arouraioi). For 

 example, Diodorus, lib. iii., cap. 30 ; iElian, ' De Natura Animalium,' lib. 

 ix., cap. 41, and lib. xvii., cap. 41 ; Rutilius, Itin. v. 285 ; ^Eschylus at 

 Sisyphus; ' Geoponicorum sive de re rustica,' lib. xiii., cap. 5; not for- 

 getting Theophrastus, and the more familiar Pliny. iElian relates how a 

 visitation and plague of Field Mice drove certain peoples in Italy out from 

 their native land, and made them wanderers on the face of the earth ; 

 destroying not only the leaves of the plants as a drought would, or extreme 

 frost, or other inclemency of the season, but eating up the very roots. 

 Rutilius also relates (I. c.) how a similar experience befel the people of 

 Cosa. Then there is the account given by Herodotus (Euterpe, ii. 141) of 

 the defeat of the army of Sennacherib, in consequence of the destruction 

 by Field Mice, during the night, of their quivers, arrows, and bowstrings, 

 which were rendered useless by gnawing. In fact, the classics are full of 



