THE WOODPECKER'S TOOLS : HIS BILL 69 



Quite different are the miner's methods. In the 

 West, where the barren mountain sides stretch 

 up into snowclad summits, on the face of slopes 

 as seamed and gray and verdureless as the 

 wrinkled trunk of an aged oak, I have seen 

 holes where human woodpeckers burrow. The 

 entrance to a mine half-way up a hillside looks 

 strikingly like a woodpecker's hole and scarcely 

 larger. Nor does the likeness vanish as we 

 think how in their long tunnels inside their 

 mountains of gold and iron and silver the delv- 

 ing miners are picking and prying and picking 

 to lengthen their burrows just as the woodpeck- 

 ers peck and pry and peck inside their wooden 

 mountain, the tree-trunk. Which shall we call 

 the woodpecker a carpenter or a miner ? 



What are the miner's tools ? Pick and drill, 

 are they not? What are the woodpecker's? 

 The same. Certainly we shall see, if we stop to 

 think, that it is not a chisel that he uses, as we 

 sometimes say. A chisel is a knife driven by 

 blows of a hammer ; like a knife its effective- 

 ness depends upon the sharpness and length of 

 its cutting edge. But a woodpecker's bill is not 

 a cutting tool. It is a wedge, but a wedge work- 

 ing on a different principle from a knife-edge. 

 Look at this one and observe that, though strong 

 and stout, it is not sharp and has no true cut- 



