240 NATURAL HISTORY 



LETTER XIII. 



TO THE SAME. 

 DEAR SIR, April 12, 1772. 



WHILE I was in Sussex last autumn, my residence 

 was at the village near Lewes, from whence I had for- 

 merly the pleasure of writing to you. On the 1st of 

 November, I remarked that the old tortoise, formerly 

 mentioned, began first to dig the ground in order to the 

 forming its hybernaculum, which it had fixed on just 

 beside a great tuft of hepaticas. It scrapes out the 

 ground with its fore feet, and throws it up over its back 

 with its hind ; but the motion of its legs is ridiculously 

 slow, little exceeding the hour-hand of a clock 1 ; and 

 suitable to the composure of an animal said to be a 

 whole month in performing one feat of copulation. 

 Nothing can be more assiduous than this creature 

 night and day in scooping the earth, and forcing its 

 great body into the cavity; but, as the noons of that 

 season proved unusually warm and sunny, it was 

 continually interrupted, and called forth, by the heat 

 in the middle of the day; and though I continued 

 there till the 13th of November, yet the work remained 

 unfinished. Harsher weather, and frosty mornings, 

 would have quickened its operations. No part of its 

 behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timi- 

 dity it always expresses with regard to rain ; for though 

 it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of 



1 The motion of the tortoise's legs being, as Mr. White remarks, ridi- 

 culously slow, is taken notice of in Homer's Hymn to Hermes, v. 28. 



BoffKOfiivt) 7rp07rdpot0 Sopotr, Ipi9rj\ia TTOIT/V 

 SavXd iroffiv fiaivovaa. 



" Feeding far off from man, the flowery herb 

 Slow moving with his feet." MITFORD. 



