Field- Laborers c i 



The soil is greatly benefited, say they, by being upturned 

 and Hghtened ; and they claim that the mole takes high 

 rank among nature's field-laborers, and should be honored 

 accordingly, not only for his work as plowman, but also 

 for his extraordinarily large and voracious appetite for 

 smaller animals of all sorts, which do far more injury to 

 the crops than himself. 



Wherever a mole lives the organic matter in the soil 

 must be continually receiving increase, for it lives almost 

 entirely on animal food — such as worms, grubs, insects, 

 as well as mice, dead birds, hzards, frogs — and as it is 

 extraordinarily voracious, large numbers of these must be 

 consumed, their remains, digested or not, being left in the 

 earth. Large quantities of vegetable matter are also 

 carried into its nest by the mole every year, and there 

 they are, of course, left to decay. When, therefore, one 

 thinks of the thousands of moles still existing, and the 

 many more thousands and milhons of past countless gene- 

 rations, every one of which lives, or lived, the same sort of 

 life, always burrowing, always feeding, and always making 

 nests year by year, it is evident that their effect upon the 

 soil — in places where they are, or have been, plentiful — 

 can certainly not be small. 



And now we turn to another very different set of work- 

 ers, most unlikely ones we should say at first sight, who 

 are helping to improve and prepare some of the limy 

 mud-flats of the East Indian Archipelago. At present, 

 we believe, their work has been watched only on the Keel- 

 ing or Coroz Islands; but what crabs are doing now crabs 

 may have done, and have most probably done, in the past, 

 so that some part at least of the present fertility of other 

 mud-flats, perhaps of coral islands, may be owing to them. 



