ever since with satisfactory results.

Guillotine traps should be baited with small pieces of Vienna sausage (Wienerwurst) or bacon. The trigger wire should be bent inward to bring the bait into proper position to permit the fall to strike the rat in the neck, as shown in the illustration (fig. 1).

Other excellent baits for rats are oatmeal, toasted cheese, toasted bread (buttered), and sunflower or pumpkin seeds. When seed, grain, or meal is used with a guillotine trap, it may be placed on the trigger plate, or the trigger wire may be bent outward and the bait sprinkled under it.

Fig. 1.—Method of baiting guillotine trap.

Wire cage traps (French) also are useful for catching rats, but in the long run the kinds recommended above are much more effective. While trapping, all other food should be removed and the trap bait should be changed often. Rats are very suspicious, and baits and traps should be handled as little as possible. Increased success may be secured both in trapping and poisoning if the rats are fed for a night or two with the kinds of food to be used for bait.

USE OF FERRETS AND DOGS.

A ferret is useful for the purpose of driving rats out of burrows and other hiding places so that dogs can capture them. An experienced person with dogs and ferrets trained to work together can kill many rats when they are numerous. But the amateur ferreter is likely to be greatly disappointed.

In the rice fields of the far East the natives build numerous piles of brush and rice straw and leave them for several days until many rats have taken shelter in them. A portable bamboo inclosure several feet in height is then set up around each pile in succession and the straw and brush are thrown out over the top while dogs and men kill the trapped rodents. Large numbers are killed in this way, and the plan with modifications may be utilized in America with satisfactory results. A wire netting of fine mesh may be used for the inclosure. The scheme is applicable at the removal of grain, straw, or hay stacks, as well as brush piles.

FUMIGATION.

Rats may be destroyed in their burrows in the fields, and, still more important, in levees and rice-field dikes, by the use of carbon bisulphid. A wad of cotton or other absorbent material is saturated with the liquid and pushed into the burrow, the opening being packed with soil to prevent escape of the gas. All animals in the burrow are asphyxiated. Fumigation about buildings is not so effective, as the gas can not readily be confined.

RAT-PROOF CONSTRUCTION.

The best way of excluding rats from buildings, whether in the city or country, is by the use of cement in construction. As the advantages of this material are coming to be generally understood, its use is rapidly extending to all kinds of building. Dwellings, dairies, barns, stables, chicken houses, ice houses, bridges, dams, silos, tanks, cisterns, root-cellars, hotbeds, sidewalks, and curbs are now often made wholly of concrete. In constructing dwelling houses the additional cost of making the foundations rat-proof is slight as compared with the advantages. The cellar walls should have concrete footings and the walls themselves be laid in cement mortar. The cellar floor should be of "medium" rather than "lean" concrete, and all water and drain pipes should be surrounded with concrete. Even an old cellar may be made rat-proof at comparatively small expense. Rat holes may be permanently closed by a mixture of cement, sand, and broken glass or sharp bits of stone.

Rat-proof granaries, corncribs, and poultry houses may be