116 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



main road by which they migrate from one hunting- 

 ground to the other is to him a settled fact. One 

 of his neighbours took thirty-two moles, one by 

 one, in the course of a few days in a single trap 

 placed at the same place in a run a proof that all 

 the moles in the place that range any day over an 

 area of many acres have roads that are free to the 

 colony. All we have got to do, then, is to find one 

 of these principal roads, usually at the side of a 

 hedge, and to place a trap capable of holding as 

 many moles as may come into it, and the thing 

 is done. 



To inform my rural friend that he was not the 

 first person to have great dreams anent the mole 

 question, I related to him the history of the famous 

 Henri le Court, described by Bell in his British 

 Quadrupeds as "a person, who having held a 

 lucrative situation about the Court at the epoch of 

 the French Revolution, retired from the horrors of 

 that fearful period into the country, and there 

 devoted the remainder of his life to a study of the 

 habits of the mole, and of the most efficient means 

 for its extirpation." 



It surprised him to hear that men of brains had 

 begun to occupy themselves with this question as 

 long ago as the eighteenth century ; but the 

 thought that nothing important had resulted from 

 their efforts in so long a time did not discourage 

 him : it was simply the case that, brains or no 

 brains, he had been so lucky as to hit upon the 

 one efficacious means for the extirpation of the 



