.544 AMPHIBIALA. 



being commemorated by Derham*, and many other writers, and 

 its shell is preserved in the library of the palace at Lambeth f. 



The general manners of the tortoise, in a state of domestication 

 in this country, are very agreeably detailed by Mr. White, in his 

 History of Selbourn. " A land tortoise,'' says Mr. White, " which 

 has been kept thirty years in a little walled court, retires under 

 ground about the middle of November, and comes forth again 

 about the middle of April. When it first appears in the spring, it 

 discovers very little inclination for food, but in the height of sum- 

 mer grows voracious; and then, as the summer declines, its appe- 

 tite declines ; so that for the last weeks in autumn it hardly eats at 

 all. Milky plants, such as lettuces, dandelions, sowlhistles, &c. 

 are its principal food. On the first of November, 1771> I re- 

 marked that the tortoise began to dig the ground, in order to form 

 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 ridi- 

 culously slow, little exceeding the hour hand of a clock. Nothing 

 can be more assiduous than this creature, night and day, in scoop- 

 ing 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 thirteenth of No* 

 vember, yet the woik remained unfinished. Harsher weather, and 

 frosty mornings, would have quickened its operations. No part 

 of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it 

 always expresses with regard to rain ; for though it has a shell that 

 would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it 

 discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her 



* In a copy of the work entitled Memoirs for the Natural History of Ani- 

 mals, from the French Academy, and which was once the property of Derham, 

 the following MS. note occurs: 



" I imagine land-tortoises, when arrived at a certain pitch, cease growing. 

 For that I saw, Aug. 11, 1712, in my Lord Archbishop of Canterbury's Garden, 

 which hath been t'here ever since Archbishop Juxon's time, and is accounted to 

 be above 60 years old, was of the same size I have seen others of, of larger size, 

 and much younger." 



f This memorable tortoise appears to have exceeded the usual dimensions of 

 its species; the ihell measuring ten inches in length, and six and a half in 

 breadth. 



