INVASIONS AND CONQUESTS OF THE RAT. 14T 
Aldrovandus resumes the works of anterior writers. In the 
midst of this frightful deluge of devouring insects, of venomous 
reptiles, and of maddened wolves, which from all quarters burst 
upon France, appeared for the first time the brown rat. The 
brown rat, indigenous in the Scandinavian peninsula, has passed 
the Baltic on the skiffs of the Norman pirates, and established it- 
self at the mouth of the Elbe, of the Weser, and other northern 
rivers. Thence it marches to the conquest of the Continent, first 
waging a war of extermination on the field mice and city mice, it 
advances by degrees toward the southern countries. Its appear- 
ance in France is signalized under the reign of Louis YIL, the un- 
fortunate husband of Eleonora of Aquitaine, the introducer of the 
English. 
The brown rat, which the cat has not prevented from establish- 
ing itself firmly on the soil, has at last received the generic name 
of the species. During the six or seven centuries that we have 
had to feed it, it has destroyed an incalculable amount of the wealth 
painfully amassed by the laborers of France. This has also been 
the time in which the work of the serf nourished the indolence and 
the luxury of the noble. Carnivorous robber and invader, such 
was the Norman rat. During the last century it has found its mas- 
ter in the Muscovite and Tartar rat, otherwise called the surmulot, 
the rat of Montfau 9 on. One day in 1160 the town of Jaik, in Si- 
beria, was attacked and taken by assault, by an innumerable army of 
rats. The attack took place at 4 P.M. The vanquished accorded 
in full sovereignty to the conquerors a quarter of the city. 
These new rats, unknown to Europe, descended from the heights 
of the same central plateau of Asia, whence at the same time 
came those Hun and Mongol horsemen who spread themselves 
right and left, taking at one time the West and Rome, at another 
the East, from Jerusalem to Pekin. 
The campaign opened by the conquest of a city, the flood of 
invasion ceased not ; it soon became a torrent. The surmulot 
landed in Europe. Within fifty years it has penetrated t(5 the 
heart of all the capitals. None knows where the course of its sub- 
terranean progress will cease. Paris trembles at furnishing a new 
chapter to Pliny’s history of the cities overthrown by rats. The 
