House-Bearing Reptiles. 



201 



COMMON BOX TORTOISE. 

 Breakfasting en a Toadstool. 



himself making a fresh attack upon another species in a little 

 opening in the woods. 



Very amusing it was to watch him, as with praiseworthy 

 deliberation he ate round after round of the cap of the 

 fungus. He would bite off a mouthful of the toadstool, 

 chew it carefully until he had extracted the whole of the 

 juice, then open his mouth and drop out the masticated 

 fibre, and take a fresh mouthful, not biting inward toward 

 the stem, but breaking off the morsel next beside that which 

 he had just eaten. He paced round and round the fungus 

 as he took his bites, and as the fungus decreased in regular 

 circles, the chewed fragments increased. In less than an 

 hour he had eaten all the disk of the fungus to- the stipe, 

 and then walked slowly away to seek for another. The dis- 

 carded parts of the fungus appeared quite dry when 

 examined, nothing nutritious being left in them. There 

 must have been some very good reason for rejecting the 

 central part and the stem, which were left in every instance, 



