SACRED MISSIONS OF THE RAT. 
145 
All the families of rats, endowed with prodigious fecundity, are 
the emblems of those miserable and prolific populations which 
now cover the globe, and which hunger and the hatred of labor 
urge to maker war on each other, and to devour each other. One 
fine day they will disappear along with war, pestilence, and 
famine. 
The rat, like the barbarian, is a scourge which God sends on 
the civilized nations to warn them and to punish them for their 
confusion of instincts and their errors in life. The rat has more 
than once been charged with the execution of divine sentences, 
and occupies in this point of view an important place in the re- 
cords of humanity. 
It is the Egyptian rat which destroyed the army of Sennacherib 
by devouring during the night all the bow strings, and all the 
leather straps of the Assyrian bucklers. Pliny has consecrated an 
entire chapter of his eighth book to relate the cities destroyed by 
the ravages of beasts. The rat has played, since Pliny’s time, an 
immense part in the history of these ruins. Have we not all heard 
the fate of that Archbishop of Mayence, dragged from his tower 
by a band of rats aroused by God, dragged into the middle of the 
Rhine and there drowned by the same rats, who did not retreat 
satisfied, says the Calvinist legend, until they had caused to dis- 
appear, by dint of gnawing, the holy tapestries, the name, and the 
portrait of this impious priest ! 
That natural vice which leads the rat to turn its incisors against 
its own blood, is the corrective of its extreme prolification. Were 
it not for ratophagy, the rat would already^ have devoured all the 
inhabitants of the globe. And if the barbarians had not turned 
their arms against each other where would civilization be now ? 
And if Lord Aberdeen and M. de Nesselrode — I mean, if the Nor- 
man and the Tartar rat, instead of being jealous of each other, 
should unite to-morrow for example, to share the East between them ! 
There are rats, such as the Campagnols and the Lemmings, 
which every year quit their country to seek booty in those adjoin- 
ing, and then return home, the expedition accomplished. 
Thus did the ancient Gauls — thus still the pirates, the Kabyles, 
and all the nomad populations of Africa and of Asia operate. 
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