RASTADT, a t. and fortress in Baden, stands on the river ISTurg, 3 in. from its junc tion with the Rhine, and 15 m. s.w. of Karlsruhe. It is a station on the Baden railway. Steel wares, weapons, and tobacco are manufactured. From 1725 to 1771 the town was the residence of the mar raves of ;3aden-Baden. From 1840 till 1866 the fortress of Rastadt was occupied by the troops of the Germanic confederation. Rastadt is memor able for two congresses—the former in 1714, when a treaty of peace, which brought the war of the Spanish succession to a close, was signed between marshal Villars and prince Eugene; and the latter in 1799. On the breaking up of the congress of 1799 without any definite result, the three French plenipotentiaries set old for Strasbourg on the evening of April 19; but they had scarcely got beyond the gates of Rastadt when they were attacked by a number of Austrian hussars; two of the three were slain, and the third sabered, and left for dead in a ditch. The papers of the legation were carried off, but no further spoil was taken. This flagrant violation of the law of nations roused the indig nation and horror not only of France, but of all Europe. The instigator and conductor of the assault were never known. Pop._ '75, 12,205. Rastadt is now officially spelled Bastatt.
RAT, the popular name of all the larger species of the genus mus. See MOITSE. Two species are particularly deserving of notice, the only species found in Britain, or, indeed, in any part of Europe, and both very widely distributed over the world: the BLACK" RAT (.11: rattus) and the BROWN RAT (3/. deemnanus). Extremely abundant as these animals now are, their introduction into Europe—which, if at all through human agency, was unintentionally so—took place within recent times. • Neither of them was known to the ancients. Both appear to be natives of the central parts of Asia, where other nearly allied species are also found. The black rat found its way to Europe about the beginning of the 16th c.; the brown rat first appeared at Astrakhan in the beginning of the 18th c.,
and reached Sritain and the western countries of Europe about the middle of the cen tury. The Jacobites of Britain were accustomed to delight themselves with the notion that it came with the house of Hanover, and chose to call it the Hanoverian rat. It also received the name of _Norway rat, from a belief, unquestionably erroneous, that it was introduced from Norway, a country which it did not reach until long after it was fully established in Britain.
These two species are like one another, and very similar in their habits. The brown rat is ,the larger and more powerful of the two, and has waged war against the other with such succeis as to cause its total, or almost total, disappearance from many places where it was once very abundant; so that in many parts of Britain, where the black rat was once plentiful and troublesome, it would now be difficult, perhaps impossible, to obtain a single specimen. Rats, when pressed by hunger, do not scruple to devour the weaker even of their own kind. The extirpation of the black rat does not, however, always follow from the introduction of the brown rat, each probably finding situations more particularly suited to itself. In their native regions, they exist altogether; and in seine parts of Europe the black rat is still the more plentiful of the two. Both infest ships, and are thus conveyed to the most distant parts of the world, some of them getting ashore at every port, and establishing new colonies, so that they are now common—and particu larly the brown rat—almost wherever commerce extends.
The black rat is nearly 7+ in. in length, exclusive of the tail, which is almost 8in. long. The brown rat attains a length of more than 10+ in.,with a tail little more than 8 in. long. Besides its larger size and comparative shortness of tail, it differs from the black rat in its smaller ears and less acute muzzle, as well as in its lighter color and shorter hair. The tails onoth are covered with a multitude of rings of small scales.