VOLES, 



7 



small birds. With this record before them farmers will 

 be unworthy of their reputation for sagacity if they 

 do not insist on their feathered servants being unmolested. 



As long as the plague endured in Scotland, shepherds 

 looked in vain for help from the weather — frost, snow, rain, 

 drought ; the voles seemed impervious to all change ; they 

 hived as merrily under the snow-wreaths as they darted 

 about in the midsummer glare. 



To what causes, then, can their disappearence be attri- 

 buted ? This can only be answered vaguely — to the cessation 

 of the conditions which brought about their excessive multipli- 

 cation. From the earliest times, in widely different and dis- 

 tant countries, there are records of similar outbreaks of 

 small rodents. When the Philistines carried off the Ark of 

 the Covenant they were visited by disease, and their fields 

 were overrun with swarms of mice (i Samuel v. 6), and the 

 people presented expiatory images of the mice that mar 

 the land." Holinshed records that in 15 8i there sodainlie 

 appeared, in the marshes of Danesey Hundred in Essex, an 

 infinite number of mice, which overwhelming the whole 

 earth in the said marshes, did sheare and gnaw the grass by 

 the rootes, spoyling and tainting the same with their 

 venimous teeth, in such sort that the cattell which grazed 

 thereon were smitten with a murraine and died thereof ; 

 which vermdne by policie of man could not be destroyed, 

 till at the last there flocked together such a number of 

 owles as all the shire was not able to yield, whereby the 

 marshholders were shortly delivered from the vexation 

 of the said mice." 



Other chroniclers — Stowe, Childrey, Lilly, Anstice, Lord 

 Glenbervie, Sir Walter Elliot, etc. — have described similar 

 visitations in various parts of England and Scotland in the 

 years 1615, 1648, 1660, 1745, 1813, 1825, 1836, 1864-67, and 

 1875-6. Mr. W. H. Hudson gives an interesting description, 

 in his Naturalist in La Plata," of the Pampas being over- 



