Manchester Memoirs, Vol. Ixiii. (19 19) No.'^, 7 



In 1814, Johann F'riedrich Blumenbach (i 752-1840), a German 

 naturalist of good standing, a Professor of Comparative Anatomy in 

 the University of Gottingen, wrote of the "Hedgidog" (sic) that: — * 



" It undoubtedly impales fruits on the spines of its back, and thus 

 carries them off to its burrow. The ancients observed this long since. 

 Modern writers have discredited the idea, but without any justification; 

 for I have been assured of the fact by three eye-witnesses, whom 

 I believe."t 



Further, Capt. Thomas Brown, a Scottish naturalist of some 

 standing in his day (he was a Fellow of the Linnoean Society of London 

 and President of the Royal Physical Society of Edinburgh), recordsj 

 that : — 



"During the summer of 18 18, as Mr. I.ane, the game-keeper to 

 the Earl of Galloway, was passing by the wood of Calscadden, near 

 Garliestown, in [Wigtownshire], Scotland, he fell in with a hedgehog, 

 crossing the road, at a small distance before him, carrying on his back 

 six pheasants' eggs, which, upon examination, he found it had pilfered 

 from a nest hard by. The ingenuity of the creature was very 

 conspicuous, as several of the remaining eggs were holed ; which must 

 have been done when [the hedgehog was] in the act of rolling itself 

 over the nest, in order to make as many [eggs] adhere to its prickles as 

 possible. After watching the motions of the urchin a short time, 

 Mr. Lane saw it deliberately creep into a furze-bush, where the shells 

 of several [other] eggs were strewed around, and which had, doubtless, 

 been conveyed thither in a similar manner." 



There is no clue as'to the time of day when this observation was 

 made, but it must have been in the evening, between the time when 

 the Hedgehog comes abroad and the time when it gets too dark for 

 any observation of the kind to be possible. Further, this case does 

 not refer (as do all those quoted above) to the transport of fruit, but to 

 the transport, in exactly similar manner, of the eggs of the pheasant 

 (which, for present purposes, we may regard not inappropriately as its 

 fruit !). It is, however, entirely to the point. 



Among the more miscellaneous modern English writers on the 

 natural history of mammals, the majority are against the credibility 

 of the old Hedgehog and Apples Legend. Among these are the 



* Handb. der Naturgeschide, 9th ed. , pp. 8.9-90 (1814). 



t Spieszt afferdings (wie die Alten sagen, von den Nevern hinzegehen ohne alien 

 grand bezweiselt, mir aber nun schon von drey ganz zuverlassigen Augenzeugen 

 versichert worden) Frtichte an seine Riicken : Stacheln um sie es in sein lager 

 zu tragen. 



X Anecdotes of Quadrupeds, pp. 101-102 (1831). The story appears to have been 

 copied from some newspaper or natural history magazine, but there is no clue as to 

 its original source. 



