318 A Plea for the Moles. 
and the flowers and the vegetables and even turf of the gardener 
ten-fold, aye, I venture to say a hundred-fold more than the little 
quadruped which is persecuted while they are passed over ; and all, 
forsooth, because the heaps he throws up are apparent and open, 
while their work of destruction is hidden from view, but is as in- 
jurious as it is insidious and silent. I should scarcely have completed- 
my catalogue of the benefits and injuries which moles do to man, 
if I omitted to mention the fatal results which have sometimes 
occurred from the horse of the incautious rider having put his 
foot in a mole-cast, and come down with more or less injury to 
the horseman. Notoriously this was the case with one at least of 
the Kings of England, viz., William III., who certainly lost his life 
by this mishap. As to whether the death of this monarch was a 
benefit or an injury to the people of England, I must leave everybody 
to form his or her own opinion : but certain it is that from the date 
of William the Third’s fatal accident, the adherents of the house of 
Stuart became on a sudden great admirers of the little quadruped 
whose history we have been considering, and in allusion to what they 
were pleased to consider their delivery from an usurper, one of their 
favourite after-dinner toasts was, “ The health of the little gentleman 
in black velvet.” That however may be deemed matter of opinion, 
I return to matters of fact: and that the value of the Mole is no 
fancy of the prejudiced Naturalist nor an untenable theory which 
cannot be supported by evidence, has been amply proved by those © 
who are best able to judge, the enlightened agriculturists who have 
not only taken pains to preserve this little quadruped on their lands, 
but have gone to considerable expense to procure and turn down alive 
as many as they could collect. Doubtless by so doing they often 
incurred the ridicule of their more prejudiced neighbours, but they 
derived at the same time the solid benefit of the destruction of 
injurious worms and grubs from their lands, and consequently heavier 
crops than they would otherwise have had, as they have taken pains 
to make known. 
In some of the more fenny districts in the eastern counties of 
England, such as Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, where 
vast tracts of valuable land have been reclaimed from the water by 

Ss 
as ae 
