208 THE BOOK OF NATURE STUDY 



teeth of a stout comb." * Nor can the whinchat pass unrecognised. 

 " It has a most characteristic way of perching on tall weeds in 

 the meadow grass, and there uttering a monotonous note of 

 U-tac, u-tac, u-tac-tac y nicking its rather short tail, and is rarely 

 still for long together, restlessly flitting from one stem to another 

 and at intervals fluttering into the air to chase an insect." 2 We 



might mention many more, such as lapwing and yellow wagtail 



two birds hardly to be surpassed for beauty, but the point of this 

 article is to suggest how one may begin to fill in the living 

 picture of each haunt. 



There are many other creatures in the meadowland grass- 

 snakes and frogs, snails and slugs, spiders and beetles; but if 

 the young explorers have made themselves well acquainted with 

 cuckoo-spit and the small tortoise-shell, with one or more of the 

 humble-bees, with bedeguar gall, with earthworms, moles, and 

 shrews, and with the whinchat they have made a good be- 

 ginning with the natural history of the meadow. 



Let us in leaving the meadow consider a single fact of natural 

 history, so that we may see more clearly how an understanding 

 of it makes demands on all the resources of our discipline. We 

 have noted that the mole stores earthworms for use in winter 

 as many as a hundred being sometimes found together ; and 

 we have referred to the extraordinary fact that these stored 

 earthworms are, in many cases at least, decapitated, so that 

 although alive these are unable to crawl away. Round a fact 

 like this we should let our minds play. W T e may begin by asking 

 how the mole and the earthworm happen to be both underground, 

 which is certainly not the primitive home of their respective 

 races ; we pass on to inquire how the mole catches the earth- 

 worms, and how these are often able to avoid the mole ; another 

 query raises the problem of the storing instinct ; a side question 

 leads us to consider the mole's imperfect lenses, and the peculiarity 

 of its optic nerves ; then we are bound to inquire how it is that 

 the decapitation of the earthworm prevents its crawling away ; 

 and this brings us to consider the function of the head-ganglia 

 as a motor centre. We know that in summer a lost head-end 

 may be re-grown, but that this does not occur in the low temper- 



1 See (Dixon) p. 222. 2 Ibid. 



