Letters of Rusticus. 2443 



fied with the production to form an impartial opinion respecting it. The transference 

 of the following quotations to these pages will enable the readers of the ' Zoologist' 

 to judge for themselves of the merits of Rusticus as an observer of Nature. — E. N.~] 



The Hedgehog. — " The walks about Godalming are truly delicious, whether in 

 winter or in summer, in spring or in autumn : one can never time one's peregrinations 

 amiss as regards season. Eshing has ever been a favourite haunt with me ; its old, 

 old bridge, and its old, old mill, are bits for painters. There is a bank close by this 

 bridge where I made my first acquaintance with the hedgehog. My little dog, Cap 

 — his name was once Capsicum, it afterwards shortened itself to Capsy, and finally 

 settled in Cap — my little dog Cap, in the course of a journey of discovery on a keen, 

 crisp, frosty day in January [Letter dated 17th January, 1835] poked his nose into a 

 deserted rabbit-hole in this said bank at Eshing bridge. After a while, I heard from 

 the bowels of the earth a yelping that plainly announced the discovery of some phe- 

 nomenon in Natural History. The hole was very large, and the end was filled with 

 leaves : after trying a good many contrivances that did not answer, I hit on one that 

 did, and I hauled up a lump of dried leaves about as big as my head ; outside, the 

 leaves were loose ; further in, close and tight, and after taking off layer upon layer, I 

 felt some sharp instrument run into my hand, and I knew for certain that I had in 

 my hand what I had often longed for, a somnolent hedgehog. I took him home, 

 woke him up with a gentle warmth, and had the intense satisfaction of seeing him 

 wander about a Brussels carpet, with his leafy great coat on his back, making him 

 look for all the world like some new species of armadillo. When he had satisfied my 

 curiosity, I had a sackful of dry leaves shot down in a corner of the cellar, and in 

 these I let piggy take out the rest of his nap, of which, as it afterwards appeared, a 

 term of forty-one days was then unexpired. 



" Begging pardon of naturalists for such an accusation, I can't help saying that 

 I think a great many fibs have been told about the hedgehog. In the first place the 

 old wife's fables, about sucking cows and so forth, were so horridly unbelievable, and 

 yet so damaging to little hoggy's reputation with the vulgar, that the more erudite 

 and more humane became his patrons and apologists, and made much more of him 

 than he deserves. 



" Dear old White of Selborne must have been taking a nap when he told us about 

 hoggy's liking for plantain-roots. ' The manner,' says White, ' in which hedgehogs 

 eat the roots of the plantain in my grass walks is very curious : with their upper man- 

 dible, which is much longer than their lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat 

 the root off upwards, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched. In this respect they are 

 very serviceable, as they destroy a very troublesome weed.' Boy and man this passage 

 tormented me many years, because I knew hoggy to be a blood-thirsty poacher, a re- 

 gular knight-errant for attacking vipers, and a tyrant over all manner of mice and 

 such small deer, and I thought it passing strange that he should take to cooling his 

 copper with the roots of the old gentleman's plantains. However, the tastes of pigs 

 and men are every now and then somewhat eccentric, so I left the matter sub judice, 

 until chance solved the mystery. In a grass walk I saw some flattened plants of the 

 common plantain withering and half dead ; by the side of each I found the hole, 

 bored, as White supposed, by the long upper mandible of the hoggy, but it was 

 scarcely big enough to admit a lead pencil, and so round and smooth that I said di- 

 rectly to myself, 'tis the burrow of a night-eating caterpillar : I got a trowel, and in a 



