In a neat and cleverly written little book on Spain, it is observed that "in the wine cellars the bungs in the heads of the butts containing sweet wines had little square pieces of tin nailed over them. This was to protect them from the rats who otherwise get upon the edge of the butt, and lick the sweet wine which oozes through, then begin to nibble the bung, and go on, if they are let alone, till out rushes the wine in a stream." The effects of the rats' ingenuity seems to bear rather a kind intention toward his two-legged brother, described in the following: "This happened not long ago to a large _tonel_ of the finest Pedro Jimenez, which, was stored with others in the ground-floor of a house, the owner of which was away in Seville, with the key, which he would trust to no one, in his pocket. One morning out came the bung, long nibbled by rats, and, about three hundred gallons of the wine ran out into the gutter. It was a queer sight, people rushing to dip it up with any vessel that came to hand, some of them presently using mops, and the small boys, who had found it was sweet, and lapped up as much as they could get at, lying around the street in various stages of intoxication," after the manner of our frisky friends, the joyous rats of the brewery cellars. X.--DESTRUCTIVENESS. The rat's bite, and especially that of old rats, is very poisonous, and its teeth are finely adapted for severe, quick, sharp, and deep cutting. It forms an urgent natural necessity for them, owing to the peculiar structure and growth of their teeth, to keep them incessantly working. The idea never comes to the rats of a possible breaking off of their tusks in attacking such flexible objects as bricks or lead, and the writer has seen cases in which the rats cheerfully went to work gnawing off corners of bricks and granite, in a persistent manner, so that they could make an opening large enough for their admission into a house. Nothing is exempt from their merciless teeth. They mutilate the woodwork on the valuable drawing-room chair just as readily as they would the dingiest, most plebeian sort of washtub, and they make sad havoc of upholstery of all kinds. They seem to have an especially lasting grudge against the transmission of knowledge, for books are gnawed and mutilated by them in immense quantities. They gnaw paper, from legal documents of the highest value (and many an important writing has been hopelessly destroyed by their agency), to the most worthless treatise on "Four-Fingered Mike; or, The Terror of Hoboken." Our clothing, shoes, hat-gear, etc., is turned out by the rats in a pitifully dilapidated condition. They also eat into lead pipes for the purpose of obtaining water, which it is hard for them to do without, although we have found that they can be without food for a much greater length of time. When the rats are pressed for drink on board ship, they lay low in the day-time, but in the evening they stealthily come out on the deck from