UTILITY OF THE MOLE. 49 



fire. Then came the Mole-catcher for his salary, as he caught my Moles by 

 the year. I paid him his money, and made him stare like a lunatic when 

 I told him rather than kill them, he would do me a favour if he would 

 bring rae a cart-load of his Moles, and turn them down in my fields. My 

 fields being near a village, where Rooks could not come, swarmed with wire- 

 worms. Every year one-third of my crops was quite destroyed by them. One 

 narrow field, surrounded with trees, was nearly useless from them. But at 

 length relief came; I had long hoped to see my favourites, the Mole-heaps, 

 and at length, as if by a simultaneous agreement, that little long field was 

 full of Moles, which set to manfully upon the destroyers of my crops, and 

 after some time completely destroyed them. They then passed over into the 

 next field, and the pests in this field shared the same fate as the others. I 

 now veril}' believe I have not a Avire-worm left in my fields; and as the 

 Moles have entirely done their work unsolicited, they have gone ofi" to my 

 neighbours with the same good intention." 



The farmers on the continent, particularly in Belgium, are greatly averse 

 to their being destroyed; and I believe that the most unpopular act in my 

 respected father's life, was the introdus^tion of the English Mole-trap into that 

 country, about the year 1834; and although upon a royal domain, and at 

 the command of Majesty itself, all endeavours to extirpate them proved una- 

 vailing; and the habits and wise judgment of a gardening and agricultural 

 people were yielded to as an act of expediency. Happy I am to state that 

 both His Majesty and my father have repented them of the evil, and are now 

 numbered amongst the merciful defenders of our useful little sub-cultivator, 

 the Common Mole! Thus, then, I hope 1 have clearly defended ^^the little 

 culprit" from the second and absurd charge brought against him, to the 

 satisfaction of his accusers! 



The third charge brought against the tiny Mole, in an agricultural point 

 of view, to those unacquainted with its usefulness, would lead many to sign 

 its death-warrant. Against which I will place the following evidence from the 

 pen of an agricultural gentleman, in the "Agricultural Gazette," for 1844, 

 who says, "I have wet meadows, in which they do me vast service. One 

 of my meadows was so wet that no Mole worked into it, but only burrowed 

 on the surface, barely deep enough to cover his body with the roots of the 

 grass and weeds, and this only in very dry hot days of August — the only 

 time when worms could be found. I dug a few drains, and the next summer 

 found the Moles worked as deep as the bottom of the drains, and into them. 

 Another year the drains were cut as deep as the fall would allow, and the 

 same result followed. My friends, the Moles, opened scores of their channels 

 into the very bottom of these drains, and the meadow is now firm and sound. 

 In all my meadows, finding the good they do, I never have them disturbed, 

 but only in April send out a man to level their hillocks, then roll them, 

 and 1 never have any complaint from the mowers. Depend upon it, that 

 they are very beneficial to all lands, particularly to wet bog soil. When four feet 



