Field- Labourers 75 



ferences, though it may not always be easy to discern 

 the reason for them. Moisture, however, they cannot 

 do without, and hence, while they avoid dry sand and 

 heaths, they frequent paved yards near houses in large 

 numbers. 



On the mountains of North Wales and on the Alps 

 they are rare, owing perhaps to the lack of sufficient 

 depth in which to make their winter burrows ; but 

 they are found in Scotland on hills 1,500 feet above 

 the sea ; near Turin, at a height of 2,000 or 3,000 feet ; 

 on the Nilgiri Mountains of South India, and on the 

 Himalayas. They have, indeed, an enormous range, 

 occurring in the most isolated islands, abounding in 

 Iceland, and found in the West Indies, St. Helena, 

 Madagascar, New Caledonia, Tahiti, Kerguelen's Land, 

 and the Falkland Islands, though how they reached 

 these is at present a mystery, since sea-water is abso- 

 lutely fatal to them. In the United States they are 

 plentiful ; in Venezuela, common in gardens and fields ; 

 in South Brazil the soil, to the depth of a quarter of a 

 yard or more, looks in most parts of the forest and 

 pasture land as if it had repeatedly passed through 

 their bodies. Even in the dry soil of New South Wales 

 their castings abound, and in the hot, moist jungles of 

 Bengal they occur almost everywhere. 



Strange to say, they seem to be either absent or 

 uncommon in the Canadian prairies — that is, they 

 never seem to have come in the way of the surveyors ; 

 but, after all, this does not prove much. 



Almost the whole surface of every moderately damp 

 country is covered with a layer of fine, dark, vegetable 

 mould ; it is only a few inches thick at most, from four 



