HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



87 



preserving its life by the extremely disagreeable taste 

 of its tissues. The runs I allude to above are not 

 the holes of the animals, but are small tunnels made 

 in the long grass of the field or hedgerow in which 

 the animal lives. These runs twist about and ramify 

 in all sorts of odd convolutions, and are often many 

 yards in length, and generally end in the hole of the 

 owner or owners. These mice are exceedingly 

 numerous, and although they are kept in check to a 

 certain extent by hawks, stoats, and other predatory 

 creatures, nevertheless proliferate in an astonishing 

 manner. They are exceedingly destructive, as I have 

 said before, and a gentleman whose plantations of 

 young trees suffered badly from the depredations of 

 these little anmials, hit upon the following plan to 

 rid himself of the scourge. He buried' under their 

 runs numbers of carboys, such as are used to convey 

 acids, with their open mouths upwards ; these were 

 dug up after an interval of several months, and 

 almost every carboy was more than half full of a 

 mass of decomposing mice. The mice had fallen in 

 and had been unable to escape. This shows how 

 numerous they must be. 



There is one peculiarity, however, about the short- 

 tail, and the same applies tc a certain extent to 

 the long-tail, which distinguishes it from any other 

 wild creature found in this country. The peculiarity is 

 this, that if you catch a mouse of the above species 

 in a trap, and handle him gently and coolly, he does 

 not make the slightest attempt to bite or to bolt, and 

 in a couple of days is as tame or tamer than a white 

 one. I have it on good authority, that the same 

 holds good for the mongoose of East Equatorial 

 Africa, which is quite tame a day or two after being 

 caught. The long-tail certainly does attempt, and that 

 to the utmost of his ability, to escape, but even then 

 I have never known him bite, unless roughly handled. 

 This statement may sound extraordinary, but it is 

 nevertheless true. The above facts may not apply to 

 the breeding season, probably they do not, but they 

 are true for the winter and spring, within my own 

 experience. Of course if you hurt or frighten the 

 poor little owner of the short tail, he will soon show 

 that he can bite, and that with a hearty good-will. 



There is one more fact I should like to indicate, and 

 that is that these animals are most horrible cannibals. 

 Not, indeed, that they kill one another, far from it, 

 but if one mouse dies, in cage with several, the 

 survivors immediately set to work and eat up every 

 scrap of the deceased, beginning at the head and 

 ending with the tail, in the most orthodox manner. 

 This trait in their character is probably of great 

 service to them in their wild state, for they are 

 excessively clean animals, and you can easily imagine 

 how disagreeable a dead body would soon become in 

 a hole with several inmates. So said inmates go to 

 work with the instruments and instinct which nature 

 has given them, to remove the corpse with all the 

 regularity and dispatch of a sanitary inspector. If 



you want to get a mouse, don't bother about any very 

 complicated trap, but set an ordinary mousetrap, 

 baited with a bit of cheese, in any hedgerow, and you 

 won't be long in getting a specimen. Keep the little 

 creature in a large roomy cage, give him plenty of 

 fruit and vegetable food, no cheese or meat, for 

 though he likes them immensely, they don't agree 

 with his constitution, and above all, as the animal is 

 above suspicion in point of cleanliness, keep the cage 

 and everything about it in the same condition. If 

 you find your trap down from time to time, you may 

 make sure that it is some rascally shrew is the robber, 

 for he can easily push his small flat skull between the 

 bars, 1 and so make his escape, unless, as sometimes 

 happens, the door of the trap drops on his tail and 

 he is made a prisoner. Take care how you handle 

 him, however, for he is not so good-natured as the 

 mice, and his teeth, though small, are very sharp. 

 If you will forgive the digression, there are one or 



Fig. £7. — Long-tailed Field-Mouse. 



two little points about the shrew or shrew-mouse, as 

 he is erroneously called, which I should like to call 

 attention to. He is not a mouse at all, nothing so 

 respectable. He is a member of the great family of 

 insectivorae, and nearly allied to the mole, as a glance 

 at their respective teeth will easily show you. The 

 mice, on the other hand, are rodents ; compare the 

 two sets of teeth, if you have not done so, and note 

 the striking dissimilarity. Why, the shrew is more 

 nearly related to the lion and tiger than to the mice ! 



The point of most curiosity and difficulty lies in 

 the solution of the problem of the numbers of shrews 

 which are found dead, notably by the roadside, 

 about the end of July and beginning of August. 

 Someone, I believe the late Rev. J. G. Wood, 

 propounded the theory that these shrews were killed 

 by cats and hawks. He said that the animals, from 

 their cautious and secretive habits, could only be 

 attacked with ease when crossing a roadway, and as 



