HEDGEHOG CARNIVOROUS. 
115 
men are every now and then somewhat eccentric, so I left 
the matter suh judice, until chance solved the mystery. 
In a grass walk I saw some flattened plants of the com- 
mon 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 boggy, but it was scarcely big 
enough to admit a lead pencil, and so round and smooth 
that I said directly to myself, 'tis the burrow of a night- 
eating caterpillar : I got a trowel, and in a trice the fellow 
was unearthed, and he afterwards turned to a ghost-moth* 
or yellow underwing,-|- I can't say which, for both came 
out in one cage. 
The hedgehog is properly a nocturnal carnivorous ani- 
mal ; he prowls about at night, like an owl, looking after 
the nests of pheasants, partridges, corncrakes and larks : 
he kills the old ones if he can, and sucks their eggs if he 
can't : now and then he overruns a rabbit ; but his favour- 
ite dish is a snake or an adder; he catches these while 
dozing under cover, and suffering from repletion caused by 
four or five mice lying undigested in their stomachs, tail 
on; and it is then that desperate fights ensue : it is then 
that his armour stands boggy in good stead : the deadly 
" Some years ago I had three or four hedgehogs, which I kept in a garden, 
of which they had the range ; in the same garden I also had several rabbits : 
after they had been together for some days, I found that a rabbit was killed 
every night, the remains of the skin and bones only being left : this I supposed 
to be done by my neighbours' cats, and prepared to wage war on them accord- 
ingly, but to my surprise, on peeping into the garden early one morning, I saw 
a hedgehog busy at work with his nose buried in the fresh-cut throat of an ex- 
piring rabbit ; and from further observations, I had no doubt that the hedge- 
hogs had been guilty of all the murders. — R. Davis, jun. ; Clonmel.'^ Zool. 
1293. 
* Hepialus Humuli. — E. N. [ Triphsena pronuba. — E. N. 
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