[London News.]
    The origin of the rat, like the birth of Jeames Yellowplush, is wrapped up in mystery. The ancients, according to a learned writer by M. Eugene Rolland in his “Faune Sauvage,” knew not the rat. Their condition was more gracious. But it is hard to be certain about the fauna of the ancients. When they use a word meaning mouse or perhaps even the rat in their minds. Herodotus tells, on Egyptian authority, the mice who gnawed their bowstrings as the Creek Indians tell of rats in their cosmogonic legend. This legend was fairly written in red, on a skin, and was kept during the last century in the Georgia office. Where is it now?
    The Chinese have precisely the same story, only they, like the Creek Indians, assign the victory to rats, not to the mice of the old Halicarnassian. Perhaps Herodotus meant rats, he knew nothing of cats till he went to Egypt, and about rats he may have been equally in the dark. Rats are not uncommon in Shakespeare, but Buckland says, Genner [1587] first mentions the black rat. This, though older than the brown rat, is not apparently aboriginal. The Welsh name for rat means “French mouse,” and perhaps the rat came over with the conqueror. An accomplished author on micromamologic thinks the rat was brought to Europe [involuntarily, no doubt] by the crusaders. The brown or so-called “Norway rats,” devour the black ones, and are later comers.
    If a well known character was really “a rat in Pytagoras’ time,” the argument against rats being known to the ancients falls to the ground, and Shaespeare certainly thought that rats were common in the heroic age of Denmark. Rats in the zoological gardens are a good deal to be pitied. We all know the elephant of the fable. She one day trod unwittingly on a parttridge, and killed it. Soon afterward she found the nestlings of the partidge. “Poor little things!” said the elephant; “I too, have a mother;” and, with the kindest intentions, she sat down on the nest. In the same way the rhinoceros, never dreaming of harm, lies down on rats in his house, and compresses them quite flat. Such is their doom-an example, as far as it goes, of the ruthless laws of nature, and the survival of the fittest. The instint of rats teaches them to shun a falling hiuse, but not, alas! to avoid a sleepy rhinoceros.
BN
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