184 IN LOWER FLORIDA WILDS 



great that depressions have been formed which 

 filled with sand at the time of the filling of the 

 many pot holes. It is in these "sand seeps," as 

 they are called, that the gopher makes its home in 

 our rocky pinelands. But how can the creature 

 find these sand seeps, for to all appearances the 

 forest floor, covered with dense scrub, is every- 

 where alike? It must have the guidance of some 

 special sense which distinguishes between rock 

 and sand hidden beneath the surface. 



Bartram writing of this tortoise in 1791 said: 

 ' ' When arrived at its greatest magnitude the upper 

 shell is near eighteen inches in length and ten or 

 twelve in breadth." Mr. H. C. Hubbard has 

 excavated several of their burrows near Crescent 

 City, Florida, and finds the galleries eighteen to 

 twenty feet long in the sandy ridges remote from 

 water. They descend in a straight course at an 

 angle of 35, terminating abruptly at a depth of 

 eight or nine feet below the surface. He states 

 that after excavating several feet he found the 

 walls fairly alive with a wingless cricket of the genus 

 Ceuthophilus. Farther on he found immense 

 numbers of larvae and imagoes of a small beetle, 

 and in all he obtained no less than thirteen species 



