THE MOLE AT HOME. 109 



adapted to its own special varieties of soil and earth- 

 worms. 



Our own English mole has now acquired a shape 

 and structure admirably fitted to his station in life. He 

 has immensely powerful muscles, which enable him to 

 plough through the soil with astonishing rapidity, as 

 anybody knows who has once seen the earth heaving 

 and swelling beneath the turf where he is at work 

 constructing a new tunnel. In order to make up for 

 this immense expenditure of energy, he requires a pro- 

 portionately enormous quantity of food ; his appetite is 

 positively ravenous, and he starves if forced to fast for 

 only half a day, except during his brief period of hiber- 

 nation. As a rule, he works for three hours at a time, 

 then rests three hours, then works again, and so on 

 perpetually. His fur is very thick and close, so as to 

 prevent dust from getting at the skin ; and it is ex- 

 tremely soft, so as not to rub against the burrows and 

 cause vibrations in the earth, which, as Mr. Darwin has 

 shown, frighten away the timid worms. His slender 

 snout both forms a wedge to loosen the soil and enables 

 him the better to pick his clinging prey from its narrow 

 concreted tunnel. On the other hand, an eye is almost 

 useless to a subterranean creature, and so it has become 

 practically all but obsolete, being quite buried beneath 

 the skin. In all probability it is only sensitive to the 

 presence or absence of light, not to definite forms and 

 colors. Like most other miners, he dearly loves a fight, 

 for which purpose he meets his rival above-ground by 

 night, and does battle with a fierceness and pugnacity 

 that are truly astonishing. 



The mole has a certain number of regular paths, along 

 which he makes his way rapidly and noiselessly through 

 his hunting-grounds, catching all the stray worms that 



