MECHANICS AND USEFUL ARTS. 83 



lies. Behind his track, a long course of tunnelled galleries is stretched, 

 attesting at once the ingenuity of his operations and the activity of his 

 industry. 



The old-fashioned tillers of the soil have, from time immemorial, regarded 

 the proceedings of this subterranean worker with marked hostility. They 

 never could bring themselves to tolerate his presence within their demesnes. 

 If, by accident, they crossed him in his labors at any time, they dragged 

 him forth and hung him up at once, without the benefit of judge or jury. 

 Occasionally, they even went to the length of preaching a crusade against 

 him, and organizing extensive schemes of indiscriminate massacre for the 

 extinction of his race. Yet, in reality, this sorely oppressed creature was 

 guiltless of all offence. He did no harm to the interests of his assailants, 

 but rather made them his especial care. The objects he appropriated from 

 the ground were neither useful nor harmless things; they were positively 

 injurious pests that levied a tax upon the crops by most insidious forays. It 

 would almost seem, indeed, that the persecution must have been instigated by 

 the spirit of envy, rather than by that of retaliation ; that it must have been 

 the result of shame rather than of revengeful feeling. The farmers found 

 the soil where the mole had worked not injured, but altogether too good for 

 their liking. They saw the most barren earth changed beneath his touch 

 into rich, productive mould. The wettest swamp dried itself up, as if by 

 magic, after his operations. He did effectually and well, without eyes, what 

 they bungled over miserably and did inefficiently with them. His every 

 step made their incompctency only so much more manifest by contrast. He 

 therefore received an abundant share of the meed that is too often awarded 

 at first to the world's teachers and benefactors. Envy, hatred, malice, and 

 all uncharitableness, were the recompense of his useful and suggestive labors. 



All this has, however, in these table-turning days, been changed. Agri- 

 culturists now begin to reverence the mole r and look up to him for practical 

 lessons; they study his mode of tunnelling, with heads intent upon gleaning 

 some hint which may be applied in their own practice of draining; and they 

 look upon the finely-ground material which he flings behind him, as he bur- 

 rows on, with hearts set upon finding some means whereby they may imi- 

 tate his doings upon an extended scale. Some enthusiasts among them 

 even take his name as the symbol of future successes, and inscribe it upon 

 their banners as the inspiriting word that is to lead to victory. 



The amusing little volume which takes the generic name of the mole 

 Tcrtpa, or the Chronicles of a Clay-farm narrates that the author, having 

 a stiff clay-farm of about 2-jO acres, which no one could do anything with, 

 he was driven in self-defence to take it in hand himself; and he then goes 

 on to chronicle how he vanquished difficulty after difficulty, until a stagnant 

 waste became a series of fertile and valuable fields. 



In the course of the work, we learn on what principle the teachings of the 

 mole are applicable to agriculture : The natural food of vegetable life is 

 water and air not, however, water and air in their purest states; the water 

 must contain minute quantities of saline and ammoniacal matters, and the 

 air must be contaminated \vith slight proportions of the heavy carbonaceous 

 gas that is exhaled from animal lungs. The water and air are in fact only 

 vehicles of conveyance; they are not themselves really nutritious. They 

 seem to be so merely because the substances they carry are, under ordinary 

 circumstances, altogether inappreciable to the senses. Plants are helplessly 

 fixed to the spots on which they grow; they cannot roam about in search 



