86 THE HEDGEHOG. 
to be well equipped in the struggle for life. In locomotion it 
can take rank only as a crawler; flight from pursuit is out of 
the question; the animal’s only resource in the presence of 
danger is passive resistance. Curling itself into a ball, it offers 
a spiny superficies to all-comers. Yet, considering how many 
and majestic are the forms of life which have vanished or be- 
come greatly modified through cosmical changes, the persistence 
of the humble hedgehog in its primitive shape from a period 
probably long anterior to the era of man, must be accepted 
as proof of the practical excellence of such an unpromising 
design. Moreover, that the race manages to hold its own in 
our island without any sensible diminution in numbers, is the 
more remarkable because of its relentless persecution by man. 
Justly or unjustly, it has earned the worst of characters as an 
egg-stealer and chicken-assassin. Some such accusation was 
inevitable, seeing that every creature of furtive habit and 
crepuscular activity stands condemned by the average game- 
keeper; but it is very difficult to get at the truth. Mr J. G. 
Millais has gone very systematically and sympathetically into 
the question, and it is disappointing to find that he cannot clear 
the hedgehog’s reputation. “It’s food,’’ he sums up, “ consists 
chiefly of insects, slugs, and worms; but it wiil also eat frogs, 
young rats, mice, lizards, birds’ eggs, and young birds.’’* But 
on page 120 he quotes a writer in the Fed as follows: 
‘“Hedgehogss eat raw meat voraciously, and would unques- 
tionably kill chicks in a coop. . . . The common accusa- 
tion that they suck eggs is erroneous, for they cannot crack 
them. A rat chisels through an egg-shell with his lower incisor 
teeth; a hedgehog can only crunch, and the gape of his jaws 
will not admit an egg as large as a sparrow’s. I once shut up 
an unhappy hedgehog for three days, with no food or water 
except a raw egg. It made no attempt to open it. I then gave 
an egg to a white rat, who had certainly never seen one before in 
his life. He went for it in a moment, and rolled it across tne 
room to his box, pushing it in front of him like a brewer’s man 
truncling a barrel. . . . I think there is no question who 
is the egg-stealer.”’ 
* British Mammals, i., 11. 
