1895.] 
-Is Daemoneliz a Burrow ? 
523 
the spiral burrow, in order to shorten the exit, dug yet another 
straight one.” 
“Possibly the animal used both burrows alternately, the 
‘comfortable winding one when it returned home with booty 
laden pouches; the shorter straight passage when it emerged 
light and unloaded.” 
3 gat 
Per E 
. 
Seat 
ig. 4. diagrammatic 
figure showing the difficult, if 
not the mechanical impossibil- 
ity of building a burrow in 
sand. The “Spiral Burrow” 
is colored black ; the “Straight 
B ’ is left white. The 
sand is represented by stippl- 
“The author’s observation agrees 
very well with this that each Dae- 
monélix which has no central axis, 
but consists simply of a free spiral, 
has, as a rule, no transverse piece. 
One must certainly consider these 
as incomplete structures in which 
the side canal, with its nest and 
the central canal, are not yet fin- 
ished.” 
It seems to me that the visionary 
argument in the foregoing crumbles 
as would such a burrow before it is 
half done. See Fig. 4. Conceive 
of a hollow rotunda in sand encircled 
by a spiral stairs and you have 
thought out a physical and mechan- 
ical impossibility. Grant that the 
sand was coherent enough to hold 
together till the burrow was done 
Can it be presumed for a moment 
that it could withstand the wear 
and tear of gophers climbing 
straight up this hollow passage? 
Yet the fossils show not a notched, 
scratched or rounded angle. Ifthe 
Miocene gopher had burrowed in 
half lithified sandrock as coherent 
as that in which these fossils now 
occur, it could not resist the destruction which must result 
from gophers scurrying up and down its walls. 
But no 
specimen furnishes the slightest evidence of such wear. 
