1 6 ANIMAL LIFE OF THE BRITISH ISLES. 



The adult Mole is a slave to his appetite, and if kept without 

 food for only a few hours he dies of starvation. Knowing this, 

 the old writers averred that he kept a store of bitten worms so 

 that he might draw upon it on emergency ; but this state- 

 ment has never been substantiated by careful observers. 



Every one is familiar with the diagrams of what was styled 

 fancifully the Mole's Fortress, as though it were a stronghold 

 held by force against an enemy. There is really no more 

 reason for calling it a fortress than for applying the same term 

 to a Rabbit's burrow or a bird's nest. The idea upon which 

 the originators of the fortress story worked was that the mole- 

 hill was a place of intricate passages where the invader could 

 be given the slip. Le Court, the French inventor of the 

 term, whose account was published by Antoine Cadet de Vaux 

 in 1803, described its interior as having a central chamber 

 surrounded by two galleries, one above, the other below, 

 connected by five nearly equidistant passages. From the 

 upper and smaller gallery three similar passages gave access 

 to the central hall, at the bottom of which was a bolt-hole 

 communicating with the main run. Plans and elevations, as 

 an architect would describe them, were made of these details, 

 and for a hundred years every writer on the Mole reproduced 

 these illustrations without doubting their absolute accuracy. 

 It was so much more easy to accept them than to patiently 

 explore and accurately draw the actual structure. Of course, 

 what these writers described as a fortress must not be confused 

 with the " mole-heaves " or " tumps " thrown up at frequent 

 intervals to get rid of the earth from a newly excavated run. 

 These are only a few inches in height. The home of the Mole 

 the mole-hill proper is about a foot high and about three 

 feet broad in any direction. This, as a rule, will be found 

 partly sheltered by a rTush, sometimes well out in a pasture, 

 and always on the line of the Mole's high-road, which lies 

 deeper than the newer side runs he is always excavating for 



