ffouse-Bearing Reptiles. 201 
COMMON BOX TORTOISE, 
Breakfasting on a Toadstool. 
himself making a fresh attack upon another species in a little 
opening in the woods. 
Very amusing it was to watch him, as with praiseworthy 
deliberation he ate round after round of the cap of the 
fungus. He would bite off a mouthful of the toadstool, 
chew it carefully until he had extracted the whole of the 
juice, then open his mouth and drop out the masticated 
fibre, and take a fresh mouthful, not biting inward toward 
the stem, but breaking off the morsel next beside that which 
he had just eaten. He paced round and round the fungus 
as he took his bites, and as the fungus decreased in regular 
circles, the chewed fragments increased. In less than an 
hour he had eaten all the disk of the fungus to the stipe, 
and then walked slowly away to seek for another. The dis- 
carded parts of the fungus appeared quite dry when 
examined, nothing nutritious being left in them. There 
must have been some very good reason for rejecting the 
central part and the stem, which were left in every instance, 
