COMMON SQUIRREL. 277 



creature combine to render it one of the most beautiful 

 and entertaining of our native animals. Its movements 

 are agile ; its conformation and colours elegant and pleas- 

 ing; its disposition, when early domesticated, gentle, 

 playful, and familiar. Dwelling principally upon trees, 

 and rarely descending to the ground, it leaps from bough 

 to bough with astonishing agility. It lives upon nuts, 

 acorns, beech-mast, the bark of young trees, leaf-buds, 

 and tender shoots. In eating nuts, it gnaws with consi- 

 derable rapidity through the hard shell, and then care- 

 fully removes every particle of the dry brown skin from 

 each morsel of the kernel before it is eaten. We have 

 also received unquestionable testimony that birds' eggs 

 are occasionally eaten by it. It sits upon its haunches, 

 holding its food in its fore paws, which serve the o£&ce of 

 hands. In taking its leaps, when once thrown off by an 

 effort of its long and powerful hinder legs, it is in a mea- 

 sure sustained by the horizontal spreading of its limbs 

 and bushy tail ; which latter organ is also extremely 

 useful in covering and protecting its back, over which it 

 is often turned, and in enveloping the whole lateral and 

 dorsal parts of the body when coiled up during sleep or 

 in its hibernation. It lays up stores of food for its 

 winter provision, which is not usually deposited in a 

 single place of safety, but distributed in several different 

 holes of trees, in the immediate neighbourhood of its own 

 retreat. It remains during the greater part of the winter 

 in a state of almost complete torpidity — coming abroad, 

 however,' on the occurrence of a fine day, feeding on a 

 part of its treasured hoards, and then retiring again to 

 its slumbers. According to Pliny, the Squirrel closes 

 its retreat on the side from which the wind is likely 

 to blow, and opens it on the opposite direction. 

 " PraBvident tempestatem et Sciuri ; obturatisque, qua 



