DEVASTATING POWERS OF THE EAT. 171 
do not mean London bakers' bread, but bread pure and 
unadulterated. One bushel of corn, I believe, will make 
a bushel of flour, and a bushel of flour will make sixteen 
four-pound, or thirty -two two-pound loaves. Well, then, as 
your losses are estimated at two bushels per day, that is 
equal to supplying sixty-four men with a two-pound loaf 
each, every day for six months, or thirty-two men the year 
round, and so in proportion with every other person. 
Here let me again remind you, that this calculation is 
only on the supposition that a rat will not destroy more than 
a wine-glass of corn, at strike measure, per day. But if I 
take your unanimous opinion that a rat will eat and waste 
half a pint of grain per day, why then your losses are four 
times the greater, and instead of one bushel per day you 
lose four. 
If we calculate that ten rats will eat, day by day, as much 
as a man, why then you are keeping equal to a hundred 
men in idleness, for six months in the year, or fifty men the 
year round ; at the same time saying nothing about what 
rats may rob you of during the summer months, say from 
Lady-day to Michaelmas. 
In fact, the whole of your taxes put together, poor-rates 
and all, cost not so much as it does to feed your rats. 
And now I beg to suggest a plan which, if carried out, 
would, I believe, prove that rats daily destroy more grain, 
&c., than would suffice to provide for all the poor and indigent 
in the British empire. This plan is, to raise a universal warfare 
against the whole of the rat-tribe in every farming district in 
England, and to compel the various churchwardens or over- 
seers to take down the dates and numbers destroyed in their 
respective parishes ; so that their accounts might be fairly 
contrasted with the returns of the Poor Law Commissioners 
during the same period. 
I challenge the test, and feel no apprehension for the re- 
sult ; since I am strongly of opinion, that what with black 
rats and brown rats, they would be proved to have run away 
with infinitely more than one-fifth of the farmers' corn and 
the poor man's loaf. 
In the first place let me calculate the losses sustained by 
rats on a farm near Upton-on-Severn. The paper states 
that they amounted to 1,490. Let us suppose that only ten 
