47 

 UTILITY OF THE COMMON MOLE, {TALPA VULGARIS.) 



BY J. MC' INTOSH, ESQ. 



It is a fact well known/ that man, from the earliest ages, has been at war 

 with his own class, it need not then surprise us that his arm should be lifted 

 against numbers of his friends and natural allies, but such is the fact. He 

 wages a perpetual war against the Itook, the Owl, the Sparrow, etc., and 

 contrives "artful engines," to entrap the useful Mole, who taught him draining 

 and sub-cultivation, and from whom, some day, he will learn a greater lesson, 

 and call him a prophet, that is, when he has done hanging him. Wherever 

 I go, I see trees and bushes in the corners of fields, and by gates of plan- 

 tations, the hedges by the highway side, yea even at the door-side of some 

 ruthless and ignorant biped, who calls himself 'lord of the creation,' covered 

 with the dead bodies of the poor Moles, killed without mercy or judgment. 

 Without being an enthusiast in a wrong sense, I kill nothing, not even, 

 what is called vermin, but rats and mice, and these I should not have occasion 

 to kill if my fellow-creatures would leave things as God has made them. The 

 only excuse the farmer iriakes for destroying the Mole, is, ''that their hills 

 look unsightly;" "that they eat the seed-corn, and destroy the roots of the 

 same in the construction of their hills;" and "that they stop up their 

 drains." 



Now, in answer to the first of these charges, I only wish for the sake of 

 the farmer, and the welfare of his fellow-creatures, that there was nothing 

 more unsightly on the generality of their farms than Mole hills. — Look at the 

 essence of their manure-heaps; the cifluvia of gas, which is suffered to escape 

 from them, is not only wasteful altogether, but is lost to useful vegetation, 

 and what is still worse, fills the atmosphere with particles injurious to health, 

 and often destructive to life. The evaporation from the farm-yard robs the 

 farmer of part of his substance, starves his crops, and it is well if it does 

 not, moreover, poison him and his family by its contaminating influence. 

 Some receptacles for manure are so offensive, that if they do not generate 

 typhus fever, in its worst form, which I fear is frequently the case, they at 

 least cause languor and debility; and it is a fact well known, that these 

 exhalations, so injurious to animal life, are the essence of vegetable life; and 

 the volatile substance, which offends our senses and injures our health, if arrested 

 in its transit by the hand of skilful industry, may be so modified in the 

 great laboratory of nature, as to greet us in the fragrance of a flower, regale 

 us in the luscious peach, pear, or plum, or furnish the stamina of life in 

 substantial viands from the field and stall of the cultivator. Again look at the 

 dirty hedges and the filthy ditches, etc., which to me are ten thousand times more 

 unsightly and unprofitable than as many acres of Mole-hills. 



I entirely agree with Mr. E. Jesse, in his "Natural History," page 137, 

 when he asserts that Moles were intended to be beneficial to mankind. Sheep 

 invariably thrive better, and are more healthy Qft-ttttge pastures where Mole- 



VOL. IV. /^^"" "^ " 



