202 WILD NEIGHBORS CHAP. 
No similar utilization seems to have been made 
of the quills of the European porcupine, although 
the longest ones are turned into fancy penholders ; 
and in India and Malaya they weave little baskets, 
etc., out of them, which are often as pretty as they 
are strange. 
Reviewing its narrow life, the strongest impres- 
sion left upon one’s mind seems to be that of the 
creature’s sluggishness and stupidity. These are 
perhaps concomitants, if not consequences, of its 
strictly vegetarian life, in which its tastes are so 
simple that it rarely seems to have to make the 
least exertion for food at any season of the year ; 
and of a highly protected condition, which makes 
it careless of danger, and hence unvigilant and 
steadily inclined to sluggishness of mind as well as 
of body. It is not well for an animal to be too 
safe or too comfortable, for its mind grows rusty 
with disuse, or, if it never had use, lies inert and 
the whole creature exists on a low plane. I do not 
know another animal of the American woods that 
is so well off and so uninteresting as the Canada 
porcupine. 
The porcupines are the central figures in a group 
of rodents, called after them Hystricomorpha. 
This group is one of the sections of the suborder 
of Simplicidentates, which have only two upper 
teeth (incisors) in front, instead of four, as in the 
picas and rabbits (Duplicidentates); and it con- 
tains eight families, some of which are extinct, 
