The Black Rat. 
149 
CHAPTER VII. 
The only species of Rat known at this time was the 
black, or as it is sometimes called, the old 
English rat. Mr. Frank Buckland, in his 
Curiosities of Natural History (1st series, p. 57), considers 
that this species was introduced into England from 
France. The Welsh name for the rat is Llygoden Frengig, 
the French mouse. The earliest account of it is by 
Gesner, in his Historia Animalium, published at Zurich, 
about the year 1587. The brown species, erroneously 
called the Norway rat, was a native of India and Persia, 
and did not make its way from those distant regions 
till many years after the arrival in England of its black 
congener. The black rat, like other primitive occupiers 
of the soil, has been gradually expelled from its haunts 
by the later colonist, and is now almost extinct in this 
country. According to Carew, rats were rather too 
plentiful in Cornwall in 1602 :— 
“Of all manner of vermin, Cornish houses are most pestered 
with rats, a brood very hurtful for devouring of meat, clothes, and 
writings by day; and alike cumbersome through their crying and 
ratling, while they dance their gallop gallyards in the roof at night.” 
(;Survey of Cornwall , p. 73, ed. 1811.) 
The effect of poetry on Irish rats is often mentioned 
by dramatists. Ben Jonson writes :— 
“ Khime them to death, as they do Irish rats 
In drumming tunes.” 
{The Poetaster , v. apologue.) 
