244 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



The Field Mouse (Mus sylvaticus) is another mis- 

 chievous little animal, and very abundant in our 

 gardens, fields and copses, where it burrows in the 

 soil or under moss. We have many times explored 

 its storerooms, and have been astonished at the result 

 of its labour ; it is not an unusual thing to find in one 

 of these receptacles quite a large handful of nuts, 

 which must have been brought from a distance of 

 many hundred yards in the middle of the park for 

 instance. Nuts, however, are not the only stores laid 

 in by the long-tailed field mouse. Towards the end 

 of the summer of 1871, a farm labourer, in ploughing 

 up a patch of land in this neighbourhood, laid bare 

 two nests of this species, and in each of them he found 

 three ovate masses of a dark colour and a somewhat 

 yielding consistence, which he gratuitously informed 

 us were young truffles, but as the materials of which 

 they were composed afforded evidence, to more senses 

 than one, that they were derived from a locality where 

 cattle "most do congregate," we at once suspected 

 they were the cocoons of an insect. Three of them 

 were about the size of thrush's eggs, and the other 

 three" smaller. We kept them through the winter, 

 and the following season we had the satisfaction of 

 ascertaining that they were the cocoons of Copris 

 lunaris, a rare beetle with us, which we had never 

 met with before. 



The Harvest Mouse (Micromys minutus), which 

 appears to have been unknown to Naturalists as a 

 British species down to the time of Gilbert White, is 

 not at all uncommon in our cornfields in the summer 

 months, and our corn ricks in winter. Its more or 

 less globular nest, which is attached to the corn stalks 

 several inches from the ground, is composed of blades 

 of grass reduced to the finest fibres in the interior, 

 but coarser on the outside. At first it is constructed 

 with a lateral opening near the top, and when the time 

 for converting it into a "procreant cradle" has arrived, 



