Cats naturally suggest rats and mice. It was an ancient belief that these sprang spontaneously from any mass of putrefaction. “Mice excell all living creatures,” writes one of the ancient authorities, “in the knowledge and experience of things to come: for when any old house, habitation, tenement, or other dwelling place waxeth ruinous and ready to fall, they perceive it first, and out of that their foresight they make present avoidance from their holes, and betake themselves to flight even as fast as their little legs will give them leave, and so they seek some other place wherein they may dwell with more securitie.” Our readers will naturally recall the proverbial belief that rats desert the sinking ship. Swift, in his epistle to Mr. Nugent, writes of those that “fly like rats from sinking ships,” and the desertion of the losing side has received the opprobrious name of “ratting” on this account. Maundevile, amongst many other wonderful things that he saw or heard of in his travels, came to a place where the rats were as large as dogs;[68] requiring great mastiffs for their capture, as they were altogether beyond the power of the cats of the place to deal with. “And ther ben Myse als grete as Houndes, and yalowe Myse als grete as Ravennes.” If the rats and mice kept the proportion between their respective sizes that we are familiar with, and the mice were as big as hounds, we can readily understand that the rats must have been very formidable creatures indeed, and quite beyond the power of ordinary terrier or pussy to cope with. Jordanus brought home a story of rats in India as large as foxes. The creatures he saw were probably bandicoots,[69] very rat-like animals, though not quite so big as foxes, even though the Indian foxes are much smaller than the species we have in England. A bandicoot is about twenty-one inches long, full measure, about five inches of this being tail. According to Herodotus, it was not the rats that were equal in size to foxes in India, but the ants. We can recall an absurd picture of these in one of the mediæval natural history books, where a couple of Europeans stand at a very respectful distance from a large mound that is covered with ants as big as cats, the effect of the ant-form when thus magnified being very quaint. It was a very ancient belief that oysters, mussels, cockles, and all shell fishes grew or diminished according to the phases of the moon. “Some have found it out by diligent search that the fibres in the livers of rats and mice answer in number to the days of the month’s age.” This was really a very curious discovery to make, or shall we rather say—a very curious assertion to be responsible for?