124 The Naturalist in Siluria. 



it is by this admonished of danger inside, and knows 

 perfectly well what the danger is : a carnivorous creature, 

 with jaws and teeth capable of killing it by a single 

 " scrunch." 



ROMANCING ABOUT THE MOLE. 



There is, perhaps, no quadruped, of like diminutive 

 size, about which so much has been written as the Mole, 

 the subject seeming to have had a fascination for marn- 

 malogists, as that of the cuckoo for ornithologists. Bell, 

 in his " History of British Quadrupeds/' the accredited 

 standard work on this department of our native fauna, de- 

 votes twenty-six pages to it ; while dismissing the badger 

 with nine, the fox with eight ; giving the wild cat only 

 five ; and to both species of the marten perhaps the most 

 interesting animals of all scant twelve between the two. 

 Alike voluminous have been other writers treating of the 

 Mole; and, were all that has been said of it true, its 

 story would well merit such enlargement of detail. Even 

 what is true fairly deserves this ; but most of the truthful 

 is that portion of its life's history and habits that remains 

 untold ; while whole chapters of fiction about it have long 

 passed current as fact. 



One of the most notable of these misrepresentations is 

 the tale of the mole's so-called " fortress " or castle, which 

 has not only been described by authors, but delineated by 

 artists, the picture of it to be seen in nearly every illus- 

 trated work on quadrupeds, encyclopaedias among the 



