THE TORTOISE. 



Habits, mauuers, &c. 



when it first appears in the spring, it discovers 

 very little inclination for food, but in the height 

 of summer grows voracious; and then, as the 

 ttummer declines, its appetite declines, so that 

 for the last six weeks in autumn it hardly eats at 

 all. Milky plants, such as lettuces, dandelions, 

 eow-thistles, &c. are its principal food. 



" On the first of November, 1771, I observed 

 the tortoise began to dig the ground, in order to 

 form its hybernaculum, which it had fixed 011 

 just before a great tuft of hepaticus. It scrapes 

 out the ground with its fore-feet, and throws it 

 up over its back with its hind ones; but the mo- 

 tion of its legs is ridiculously slow, little exceed- 

 ing the hour-hand of a clock. Nothing can be 

 more assiduous than this creature night and day, 

 in scooping the earth, and forcing its 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 November, yet the work re- 

 mained unfinished. Harsher weather, and frosty 

 mornings would have quickened its operations. 



tf No part of its behaviour ever struck me more 

 than the extreme timidity it always expressed 

 with regard to rain, for though it has a shell 

 which would secure it against the wheel of a 

 loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solici- 

 tude about vain, as a lady dressed in all her best 



