1146 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
main road by which they migrate from one hunting- 
ground to the other is to him a settled fact. One 
of his neighbours took thirty-two moles, one by 
one, in the course of a few days in a single trap 
placed at the same place in a run—a proof that all 
the moles in the place that range any day over an 
area of many acres have roads that are free to the 
colony. All we have got to do, then, is to find one 
of these principal roads, usually at the side of a 
hedge, and to place a trap capable of holding as 
many moles as may come into it, and the thing 
is done. 
To inform my rural friend that he was not the 
first person to have great dreams anent the mole 
question, I related to him the history of the famous 
Henri le Court, described by Bell in his British 
Quadrupeds as “a person, who having held a 
lucrative situation about the Court at the epoch of 
the French Revolution, retired from the horrors of 
that fearful period into the country, and there 
devoted the remainder of his life to a study of the 
habits of the mole, and of the most efficient means 
for its extirpation.” 
It surprised him to hear that men of brains had 
begun to occupy themselves with this question as 
long ago as the eighteenth century; but the 
thought that nothing important had resulted from 
their efforts in so long a time did not discourage 
him: it was simply the case that, brains or no 
brains, he had been so lucky as to hit upon the 
one efficacious means for the extirpation of the 
