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habitat, depending for drink on the water which rests on the leaves 

 as dew or may fall as rain. They occur in adundance in Pennsyl- 

 vania and throughout one particular ridge which we have had op- 

 portunity to inspect closely there must be fully as many as one for 

 each ten acres of land. We have had opportunity to observe them in 

 their winter retreats, which consist merely of holes in the ground 

 under leaf mold and beneath the leaves, as with the Wood Turtle, 

 whose wintering habits it imitates. We have also been so fortunate 

 as to find their nests with eggs, and we know that they live for many 

 years in one circumscribed or limited area, often^;imes going only 

 far enough from a certain knoll or hillside to find water, when such 

 can be found within convenient distance. 



These turtles become very old, reaching, in common with some 

 other species of the Order, the age of at least a century, and doubt- 

 less more. 



Variations of the Common Box Turtle and Special Notes. 



Two specimens show only a rudimentary fifth digit, or toe. These 

 are our numbers 4110c and 5822c. One showed a zigzag curvature of 

 the dorsal keel, due to the alternate twisting of vertebral scutes. 



Several differences: — In a series of forty-two specimens, seventeen 

 males and twenty-five females, the following differences were observ- 

 ed. All males had a marked concavity in the posterior half of the 

 plastron, in fact, the two sexes were separated using this character 

 as a basis, and the accuracy of this division was subsequently con- 

 firmed by dissections. The carapace of the male has more or less of 

 a flare at the posterior corners. The nuchal or neck notch is not 

 quite so well marked in the females. The plastron of the females is 

 very convex. The relation of both height and width is greater in the 

 females. In the males the carapace is usually somewhat flattened. 

 In other words, the carapace of the female approaches more nearly 

 a spherical shape than does that of the male. 



Striations on the shell appears to be more marked in the young 

 than in the old. Of course, the very young show none. Up to a 

 certain size the ridges increased in size and number. After that it 

 would appear that they become shallower or wear away and finally 

 disappear. 



There is great variation in the coloration. The original color 

 pattern seems to be, for each vertebral scute to have a dark center 

 with yellow keel, and a circle of white spots, for each costal scute a 

 black center with a yellow surrounding ring, which becomes broken 

 up into yellow spots. These, as the turtle grows, elongate, and 

 finally become very irregular in arrangement. This elongation of 

 yellow spots is greatest in an outward direction toward the margin, 



