NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE 205 



ponds and banks of streams, performing all its functions in a 

 swampy, wet soil. With a pair of fore-feet, curiously adapted 

 to the purpose, it burrows and works under ground like the 

 mole, raising a ridge as it proceeds, but seldom throwing up 

 hillocks. 



As mole-crickets often infest gardens by the sides of canals, 

 they are unwelcome guests to the gardener, raising up ridges 

 in their subterraneous progress, and rendering the walks 

 unsightly. If they take to the kitchen quarters they occasion 

 great damage among the plants and roots by destroying whole 

 beds of cabbages, young legumes, and flowers. When dug 

 out they seem very slow and helpless, and make no use of 

 their wings by day ; but at night they come abroad, and make 

 long excursions, as I have been convinced by finding stragglers, 

 in a morning, in improbable places. In fine weather, about 

 the middle of April, and just at the close of day, they begin 

 to solace themselves with a low, dull, jarring note, continued 

 for a long time without interruption, and not unlike the chat- 

 tering of the fern-owl, or goat-sucker, but more inward. 



About the beginning of May they lay their eggs, as I was 

 once an eye-witness ; for a gardener at a house where I was on a 

 visit, happening to be mowing, on the 6th of that month, by the 

 side of a canal, his scythe struck too deep, pared off a large 

 piece of turf, and laid open to view a curious scene of domestic 

 economy : 



. . . " Ingentem lato dedit ore fenestram : 

 Apparet domus intus, et atria longa patescunt : 

 Apparent . . . penetralia." 



There were many caverns and winding passages leading to 

 a kind of chamber, neatly smoothed and rounded, and about 

 the size of a moderate snuff-box. Within this secret nursery 

 were deposited near a hundred eggs of a dirty yellow color, 

 and enveloped in a tough skin, but too lately excluded to con- 

 tain any rudiments of young, being full of a viscous substance. 

 The eggs lay but shallow, and within the influence of the sun, 

 just under a little heap of fresh-mowed mould, like that which 

 is raised by ants. 



When mole-crickets fly they move "cursu undoso" rising 



