56 MAMMALIA. 



this without any great apparent effort." '•' Dr. Godman also tells us 

 that one which he had " in a basket on the mantlepiece of a parlour 

 made its escape, and fell to the hearth ; apparently it sustained little 

 injury by the fall, but hurried on until it reached the wall, where it 

 began to travel round the room. Whenever its course was impeded 

 by the feet of the chairs, which were of large size, it would not go 

 round them, but wedging itself between them and the wall, pushed 

 them with apparent ease far enough to obtain a free passage, and it 

 thus continued to move several in succession. What was more 

 astonishing, it passed in a similar manner behind the legs of a small 

 mahogany breakfast-table, and pushed it aside in the same way it 

 had done the chairs, finally hiding itself behind a pile of quarto 

 volumes, more than two feet high, which it also moved out from the 

 wall." t Now I have made a pile, just two feet high, of quarto 

 volumes, and find that to move it on a smooth, painted floor requires 

 a force of eighteen pounds (Avoirdupois), and on a carpet, of twenty- 

 two pounds. In order to display a degree of strength proportionate 

 to the difference in weight of the two, a man would have to exert a 

 push pressure of twelve thousand pounds ! 



Its nest is commonly half a foot or more below the surface, and 

 from it several passages lead away in the direction of its favorite 

 foraging grounds. These primary passages gradually approach the 

 surface, and finally become continuous with, or open into, an ever 

 increasing multitude of tortuous galleries, which wind about in every 

 direction, and sometimes come so near the surface as barely to 

 escape opening upon it, while at other times they are several inches 

 deep. Along the most superficial of these horizontal burrows the 

 earth is actually thrown up, in the form of long ridges, by which the 

 animal's progress can be traced. The distance that they can thus 

 travel in a given time is almost incredible. Audubon and Bachman 

 state that they have been known, in a single night after a rain, to 



* Quadrupeds of North America, vol. I, 1846, pp. S5-86. 



f American Natural History, by John D. Godman, M. D., vol. I, 1842, p. 64. 



