1063. To destroy Rats and other Vermin.—Sponge, if cut in small pieces, fried or dipped in honey, and given to vermin, distends their intestines, and effectually destroys them. The addition of a little oil of Rhodium will tempt them to eat.
A better method would be to feed them regularly two or three weeks in any apartment which they infest. The hole, by which they enter, being first fitted with a sliding door, to which a long string may be added; any apartment might thus be turned into a gigantic rat-trap.
1064. Another Method of Destroying Rats.—Lay bird-lime in their haunts, for though they are nasty enough in other respects, yet being very curious of their fur, if it is but daubed with this stuff, it is so troublesome to them that they will even scratch their skins from off their own backs to get it off, and will never abide in a place where they have suffered in this manner.
1065. To destroy Rats or Mice.—Mix flour of malt with some butter; add thereto a drop or two of oil of anise-seeds; make it up into balls, and bait your traps therewith. If you have thousands, by this means you may take them all.
1066. A Mouse Trap, by which forty or fifty Mice may be caught in a Night.—Take a plain four-square trencher, and put into the two contrary ends of it a large pin, or piece of thick knitting-needle; then take two sticks about a yard long, and lay them on your dresser, with a notch cut at each end of your sticks, placing the two pins, stuck on the corner of the trencher, on the notches of the two sticks, so that one corner of your trencher may lie about an inch upon your dresser or place that the mice may come to; then let the corner that lies opposite to this be baited with some butter and oatmeal, plastered fast on, and when the mice run off the dresser to the butter, it will tip them into a vessel full of water, which you must place under the trencher, in which they will be drowned.
That your trencher may not tip over, with a little sealing-wax and a thread seal the string to the dresser and trencher, and it will remain in good order for weeks or months.