Having thus given the "little brute" a bad name, he pertinaciously hunts him through the two volumes of his essays; nay, he does more, for, on account of his Whiggism, he is the only wild animal banished for ever from Waterton Hall, that happy home for all other fowls of the air and beasts of the field, against which gamekeepers wage war as vermin. In Carpenter's edition of Cuvier, however, an account is given of the brown rat, or Surmulot, which, if true, entirely disposes of this pretty account of his advent. We are there told that he originally came from Persia, where he lives in burrows, and that he did not set out on his travels until the year 1727, when an earthquake induced him to swim the Volga and enter Europe by way of Astrakan.[10] When once he had set foot in England, he no doubt treated his weaker brother and predecessor, the black rat, much as the Stuart dynasty was treated by the house of Hanover. Though the black rat was not himself an usurper, but rather an emigrant who took possession of an unoccupied territory, his reign is also said by some to have been contemporaneous with an earlier change in the royal line of England, for he is asserted to have come over in the train of the Conqueror. He still abounds in Normandy, and to this day is known in Wales under the name of Llyoden Ffancon--the French mouse. Rats are no exception to the law which, Wordsworth says, prevails among "all the creatures of flood and field." "The good old rule, Sufficeth them--the simple plan, That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can." But the black rat has kept more than is commonly imagined. Mr. Waterton is mistaken when he adopts the popular notion that the old English breed which came in with the Conqueror is almost totally annihilated by his brown cousin. The first comer has no more been destroyed by the subsequent invader than the Celt is annihilated by the triumphant Saxon. As we find the former still holding their ground in Cornwall, Wales, and the Highlands of Scotland, so we find the black rat flourishing in certain localities. In the neighbourhood of the Tower, in Whitbread's brewery, and in the Whitechapel sugar-refineries, he still holds his own, and woe be to any brown trespasser who ventures into his precincts. The weaker animal has learnt that union is strength, and, acting in masses, they attack their powerful foe as fearlessly as a flight of swallows does a hawk; but if an equal number of the two breeds are placed together in a cage without food, the chances are that all the black rats will have disappeared before morning, and, even though well fed, the brown Brobdingnags invariably eat off the long and delicate ears of their little brethren, just as a gourmand, after a substantial meal, amuses his appetite with a wafer-biscuit.