416 MURIDA!—EVOTOMYS 
Occasionally it enters houses, and robs cupboards! and 
gardeners’ stores ;” but this does not seem to happen so often 
in the British Islands as in more northern countries—as_ in 
Norway, where in winter the habits of the local Bank Mice 
resemble those of the House Mice, which they accompany to the 
very roof.* In Norway also it accumulates stores of pro- 
visions. As stated above, the latter habit does not seem 
to be universal in this country, but Mr English once 
excavated five Bank Mice, and ninety-three cob-nuts, the 
latter all intact, and tightly packed together. In Britain it 
sometimes obtains both food and shelter by constructing a 
winter nest of short dry straw or grass in swede or potato 
clamps.‘ 
It is a hardy mouse, and is not confined to its retreat in 
times of frost or snow.° Mr Adams found it the only species 
coming to traps at a temperature of 14° Fahrenheit. 
The period of gestation was ascertained by Mr Robert 
Drane to be twenty-eight days, in a captive female which pro- 
duced a second litter that number of days after isolation with a 
previous one.° 
The young, which at birth are about as advanced in 
development as those of other mice,’ are born during a long 
sexual season, which in the south of England lasts regularly 
' One caught in a cupboard at Vaynol Old Hall, Bangor, N. Wales, in September 
1904, was forwarded to me by H. E. Forrest ; Dalgliesh has also sent me a similar 
note ; and see also Rope, Zoolog?st, 1898, 503. 
2 J. Sutton, Journ. cit., 1888, 23. 
* In the Yukon region W. H. Osgood found £. dawsoni always about log-cabins 
(North Amer. Fauna, No. 19, 1900, 34). In Kamchatka 4. wosnessenskiz frequents 
dwellings and accumulates stores of food often carried from quite a distance ; thus 
sheltered, it rears young throughout the year, but on the tundra is inactive in winter ; 
N. G. Buxton, in J. A. Allen, Bud. Amer. Mus. Nat. Fist, 31st March 1903, 147-8. 
! G. Roberts, Zoologist, 1866, 206 ; H. A. Macpherson, Journ. cit., 1894, 149, «nd 
Lakeland. : 
® R. J. Cusninghame took specimens (British Museum) of the Norwegian £. 
glareolus suecicus in January ard February, on two or more feet of snow, in cold 
weather ; and in that country Hvofomys tunnels under the snow (Collett). More 
probably it objects rather to wet than to cold weather. In this connection it may be 
well to contrast the shrews, whose voracious appetite and rapid digestion compel 
activity in all weathers to avoid starvation, with the mice, which, although large 
eaters, have a slower digestion, and can exist much longer without food. 
® Thus confirming F. Lataste’s “law”; see above, p. 375; had she not been 
nursing, the young would presumably have been born on or about the 21st day. 
7 Lataste, 382. 
