The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-11-25

Indifference, and not any particular difficulty in destroying them. accounts for the multiplication of the plague in the open fields, banks, preserves and corn stacks. Rats in such cases can always be killed by poisoning them in their burrows, and as they usually die under ground no risk is incurred after their death either from the decay Of the bodies or from other and valuable animals eating the poisoned carcasses. Meal is put into the holes with a long spoon for TWO or thgee nights. Then the supply is omitted for a night, and finally poisoned meal is put in and the holes stopped outside.
 This is not possible in houses or even near them, but it is very effeCtual ill the fields, and one peculiar feature of the recen, rat invasious is that they are mainly confined to the rural dis tricts and to the open country. In towns, owing to bet CT sanitation and the removal of all dust hole rubbish. hey havt greatly diminished. II l. q
 fact that the surroundings of ur1juaTy i. .ndon houses trr enormously lner. claan and heaIthiul lhau th0s, "f ilo ordinary cOun,ry house. where Iherc are no "deatructors, and refuse arru- mulates in some corner or other, vhc re. so long a. it is out ot sigh;, it k tgs- I'ually out of mind.
 That there is something absolutely repulsive in the rat per SC is partly proved by he instinctive horror in l which it is held alike by. men. women, ! children and most other. animals. Horses will often refuse to feed and are ! unable to sleep if there is rat in the stable by night. Birds of all kinds hold 1 them in horror, except those which, like the now almost extinct bustarG make them their principal food A her
 is quite helpless against them and is often killed on the nest, and though a partridge would defeat a rat by day and drive it off, it can do no hing against it at night. Rats are said to have broken up and caused the removal
 of the gullery from Sedge Fen at Hove
 ton, near Norwich. to its present se-
 cure position in the sedges of the Little Broad, where the water protects them 1 effec;ually even from the most enter prising rat.
 Some time ago a medical correspond
 ent of the Spectator wrote to draw at tention to the way in which rats direct
 ly cause sickness and death by poison-
 ing shallow wells with their decayfng
 bodies. They are thirsty creatures, and in their eagerness to reach water fall into the wells and are drowned, Sever
 al fatal cases of so-called septic pneu- 1 n1oDia wera fo1ln6 ta he dt1e tO drink, l ing water so poisoned. That they carry
 plague is well known. But, in addi- ton, they are disseninators of every I kind of disease which can be conVeyeC
 into drains and from drains, for of al highways the rat loves drain ta 1 best.
 l It is one of the curiosities of anima l temperament that while the brown r1j
 is so universally detested, the closely
 related Alexandrian rat-the white oi
 piebald varieties are well known in this
 country-is almost favorite. It is a very quiet, docile little animal, almost
 affectionate in it's relations with man l and constantly kept as a pet by child. 1 ren. It is clean and very gentle, nevel by any chance offering to bite, and is as intent on storing up food as if it had
 never forgotten the. experience of itS
 ancestors in the "lean years when Jo'
 seph ruled under Pharaoh. It is tho
 humblest of all domestic pets, but of.
 ten quite, interesting in it's ways, thu only drawback to it's company being the close resemblance in appearance stC l the criminal brown rat. <