60 



CLASS REPTILIA. 



That we may leave nothing unsaid respecting the manners 

 of this tortoise, we shall quote an interesting account given by 

 Mr. White in his History of Selbourn, of one in a domesti- 

 cated state : — " A land tortoise, which has been kept thirty 

 years in a little walled court, retires under ground about the 

 middle of November, and comes forth again about the middle 

 of April. 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 summer declines, its 

 appetite declines, so that for the last weeks in autumn it 

 hardly eats at all. Milky plants, such as lettuces, dandelions, 

 sowthistles, &c., are its principal food. On the first of 

 November, 1771? I remarked that the tortoise began to dig 

 the ground, in order to form its hybernaculum, which it had 

 fixed beside a great tuft of hepaticas. It scrapes out the 

 ground with its fore feet, and throws it up over its back with 

 its hind, but the motion of its legs is ridiculously slow, little 

 exceeding the hour hand of a clock. Nothing can be more 

 assiduous than this creature, night and day, in scooping the 

 earth, and forcing its great 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 until the 

 thirteenth of November, yet the work remained unfinished : 

 harsher weather and frosty mornings would have quickened 

 its operations. No part of its behaviour ever struck me more 

 than the extreme timidity which it always expresses 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 solicitude about rain, as a lady dressed in her best 

 attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its 

 head up in a corner. If attended to, it becomes an excellent 

 weather-glass, for as sure as it walks elate, and as it were on 

 tip-toe, feeding with great earnestness in a morning, so sure it 



