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, 



