THE TORTOISE AND TURTLE. 31 



Almost all other creatures are, in their youth at any rate, 

 gay and frolicsome, delighting in their powers of speed and 

 activity. No one has ever observed the tortoise at play; it 

 can neither run nor frisk, climb a tree, nor throw a somer- 

 sault. It plods gravely on from its birth to its death, like 

 a creature in a living tomb, carrying a burden that seems 

 almost too great for its strength eating a little, sleeping 

 a great deal, thinking, it must be presumed, for even a 

 tortoise must do something, deeply and uninterruptedly. 

 As it sees so little of the world around it, we must suppose 

 that its meditations are self-directed, and that it is con- 

 tinually occupied with attempts to solve the problem of the 

 why and the wherefore of its own existence. As it has a 

 hundred years to think this out, there is no reason to doubt 

 that were the tortoise capable of conveying its thoughts and 

 conclusions to man the results would be of the highest 

 value, and that it would be found that the speculations of 

 the our deepest thinkers are shallow indeed by the side of 

 profound meditations of the tortoise. It has, too, the 

 advantage of long traditions, and the accumulation of the 

 wisdom of ages ; for the tortoise is, perhaps, the oldest 

 existing creature on earth. Its congeners, who ranged with 

 it the surface of the earth countless ages before the present 

 race of animals existed, have all passed away, but the tor- 

 toise remains almost identical with his far-off ancestors. 



The number of varieties of the land and water tortoise, 

 the latter known as the turtle, are very great, and are of 

 high interest to scientific men; the points of structural 

 difference between them, especially in the skull, being very 

 much more numerous and important than those existing 

 between any species of animals, birds, reptiles, or fish. 



