12 
LECTURE Vil. 
- cions ; and then, as the summer declines, its appe- 
tite declines; so that for the last weeks in autumn it 
‘ hardly eats at all. Milky plants, such as lettuces, 
"" dandelions, sow-thistles, &c. are its principal food. 
On the first of November, 177L I remarked that 
the Tortoise began to dig the ground, in order to 
form its hybernaculum, w hich it had fixed on just 
beside a great tuft of Hepaticas, It scrapes out 
the ground with its fore feet, and throw^s it up 
over its back ■with its hind, but the motion of its 
legs is ridiculously slow-, little exceeding the hour 
hand of a clock. Nothing can be more assiduous 
than this creature, night and day, in scooping 
the earth, and forcing its great body into the ca- 
vit}-; but as the noons of that season proved 
unusually w-arm and sunny, it was continually 
interrupted, and called forth by the heat in the 
middle of the day, and though I continued there 
till the thirteenth of November, yet the work re- 
mained unfinished. Harsher w-eather, and frosty 
mornings, would have quickened its operations. 
No part of its behaviour ever struck me more 
than the extreme timidity it always expresses 
with regard to rain ; for though it has a shell 
that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded 
