SELBORNE. 



91 



LETTER XXVII. 



TO THOMAS PENNANT, ESQUIRE. 



SELBORNE, Feb. 22, 1770. 



EDGEHOGS abound in my gardens and 

 fields. The manner in which they eat the 

 roots of the plantain in my grass walks is 

 very curious : with their upper mandible, 

 which is much longer than their lower, they 

 bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upwards, 

 leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. In this respect 



HEDGEHOG. 



they are serviceable, as they destroy a very troublesome 

 weed ; but they deface the walks in some measure by 

 digging little round holes. 1 It appears, by the dung that 



1 The author of the " Letters of Rusticus " discovered this to be a 

 mistake. He found that it was not the hedgehog but a night-eating 

 caterpillar. He says : " In a grass walk I saw some flattened plants 

 of the common plantain withering and half dead ; by the side of each 

 I found the hole bored, as White supposed, by the long upper mandible 

 of * Hoggy,' but it was scarcely big enough to admit a lead pencil, and 



