GNAWING ANIMALS — RODENTS 115 



up in springtime, thougli it is just at the period of 

 the spring awakening that we so often lose our pets, 

 probably owing to the sudden increased demands 

 on the digestive and respiratory systems, which 

 specially affect those that have been unsuitably fed 

 before hibernation, or those which have been kept 

 too warm or disturbed too much during the dormant 

 period. Strangely enough, this little animal, which 

 appears to us so harmless, was considered in the 

 Middle Ages to be almost as poisonous as the shrew. 

 Topsell, in his ' Four-footed Beasts,^ says : " If the 

 viper find their nest, because she cannot eat all 

 the young ones at one time, at the first she filleth 

 herself with one or two, and putteth out the eyes of 

 all the residue, and afterwards bringeth them meat 

 and nourisheth them, being blind, until the time that 

 the stomach serveth her to eat them every one. But 

 if it happen that, in the meantime, any man chance 

 to light upon these viper-nourished blind dormice, 

 and to kill and eat them, they poison themselves 

 through the venom the viper has left in them. 

 Dormice are bigger in quantity than a squirrel. It 

 is a biting and angry beast." 



Another writer of the time of Shakespeare gives 

 a pleasanter account of the dormouse. He says : 

 " Glires be little beasts, as it were great mice, and 

 have that name, for sleep makes them fat. They 

 love their fellows that they know, and strive and 

 fight against each other. And they love their father 

 and mother with great mildness and pity, and feed 

 and serve them in their age." The people of Saxony 

 believe that the dormouse has the same baneful 



