Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 153.djvu/428
remedy. The preparation loses its virtue in a few days: it should be applied as soon as it is prepared. Consequently, on some farms where the bread was scattered no result ensued; and, in dealing with a district, it is of little use clearing one farm if the next one is allowed to remain infested.
On the whole, therefore, the conclusion arrived at was, that although Professor Loeffler's method, when properly employed, is as efficacious, though not so swift in effect, as mineral poison, and has the immense advantage of being innocuous to all animals except those of the mouse tribe, yet it is open to the same objection as any other poison which must be swallowed by the object of attack—namely, the difficulty and expense of spreading it uniformly and simultaneously over a large extent of country.
The liquid costs five francs a bottle, which contains enough liquid for two English acres. It is obvious that the cost of applying this remedy to a Scottish sheep-farm would often exceed the total year's rent of the farm. Thus, to clear a farm of, say, 6000 acres, would involve an outlay of 600 in typhus-broth alone, besides the bread used and the cost of labour. In Thessaly this expense was undertaken by the Government. In this country it would seriously perturb the Chancellor of the Exchequer if he were called on to provide material for the whole infected area in Scotland, extending, as it does, roughly, to about fifty miles in length by twelve to twenty in breadth.
The Thessalian vole (Arvicola Guntheri), though nearly akin to, differs specifically from, the vole with which Scottish farmers are only too well acquainted (Arvicola agrestis). It differs also in habits; for whereas the British vole lives on the surface, and does not burrow, or, at most, scrapes out shallow runs, its Greek congener riddles the banks and fields with innumerable deep holes. At the time of our visit—mid-winter—the little animals were underground: winter in that country, though short, is a period of much more absolute repose in vegetation than in our long dripping seasons; there is no grass to tempt the voles abroad, and the presence of innumerable buzzards, kites, and kestrels, soaring and hovering over the plain from "the rising of the morning till the stars appear," seems to ensure the summary fate of any over-venturesome individual that should emerge.
The fact that birds of prey exist unmolested in such large numbers over the vole-infected districts of Thessaly, has a distinct bearing upon the theory put forward in our own country that the excessive multiplication of mice and voles has been due to the destruction of hawks and owls in the interests of game-preserving. No such proposition can be maintained in view of the plain facts of the case. Not only do the English chroniclers record recurrent visitations of this pest centuries before game-preserving, in the strict sense, was dreamt of in England, but here in Thessaly it never occurs to anybody to shoot the natural enemies of mice. They are always present in great numbers. In 1866, under the dominion of the Turks, there was an outbreak similar to that of this year and last. The Mohammedans are very kind to wild animals, and protect all that an English gamekeeper classes as vermin; but in spite of this the plague of mice comes (as it did