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At length, through the kindness of a friend, six were sent to me from Norfolk, and for two years they lived in captivity and afforded me much pleasure. They are the smallest English rodents, two of them only weighing a halfpenny; they are brown in colour with white underneath, very long whiskers and prehensile tails.
They killed the rodents by the score, yet for every one slaughtered a dozen seemed to appear. Presently the chamber became so full of powder smoke, the air so stifling, that the lads were obliged to cease firing. "Work your way up this wall," Tommy cried out to the lads as he heard them panting below. "Work your way up so we can catch hold of you, and you'll soon be out of that mess!"
We cannot draw such an inference, because the highest and most civilised races of Man exceed in the average of their cranial capacity the lowest races, the European brain, for example, being larger than that of the negro, and somewhat more convoluted and less symmetrical, and those apes, on the other hand, which approach nearest to Man in the form and volume of their brain being more intelligent than the Lemurs, or still lower divisions of the mammalia, such as the Rodents and Marsupials, which have smaller brains.
"Peter," said she, "I think you ought to go to the head of the class. That is just why. All the members of all the families I have named belong to the same order, the order of Rodents. All the members have big, cutting, front teeth. Animals without such teeth cannot gnaw. Now, as you and Jumper have learned about your family, it is the turn of Happy Jack and Chatterer to learn about their family.
The burly tapir, the largest animal of the continent though a hippopotamus would look at it with contempt is perfectly harmless; and, with the exception of a few species of tiger-cats, nearly all the other Mammalia are rodents, or belong to the order Quadrumana. The latter are by far the most numerous inhabitants of its wide-extending forests.
All over the room ran the mice, and all about darted the frightened girls. The boys were, at first, too surprised to know what to do, but, at a rallying cry from someone, they started after the mice. However, they had no weapons to kill the rodents with, and had to be content with taking kicks at them as they darted past, seeking means of escape.
Sneezing violently he sat down and ate his supper of bread and cheese with profound discontent. Each tasted monotonously of the other. Instead of two articles of diet he appeared to have something heterogeneously one in flavor. The smell of cheese he hoped wouldn't attract rats and remembered vaguely that a corncrib was architecturally immune from rodents.
It has conducted field experiments for the purpose of devising and perfecting simple methods for holding in check the hordes of destructive rodents rats, mice, rabbits, gophers, prairie dogs, and ground squirrels which annually destroy crops worth many millions of dollars; and it has published practical directions for the destruction of wolves and coyotes on the stock ranges of the West, resulting during the past year in an estimated saving of cattle and sheep valued at upwards of a million dollars.
Doors are cleverly opened by them, but when securely locked the dogs sometimes, in their impatience, gnaw holes in the lower part of the door which look like the work of rodents, though none that I saw was large enough to admit a canine of their size.
How long it took these small rodents to heap such a mass of material together I was unable to calculate, but the mound was as large as some of the shell heaps made by the ancient oyster-eating men and left by them along our coast from Florida to Maine.
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