SIR I’ETKll EADE ON TORTOISEiS. 
319 
Lntli of them will leave all other food for this, and they will 
consume at a meal a very considerable number of these Peas. 
Indeed, so fond are they of them, that they will follow a person 
accustomed to feed them with them about the garden, and will 
even try to clamber up his legs to get at them. 
After sleeping and basking, they will again cat, and then again sleep 
once or twice more during the day; but in cooler or doubtful weather, 
they usually really eat only once a day, and sometimes not at all. 
Althougli those who hawk Tortoises about the streets will often 
toll purchasers to put them into their kitchens that they may eat 
Beetles and Cockroaches, I believe it to be well understood that 
they are intrinsically vegetable feeders; — a position well put by 
Frank Buckland, who says that Tortoises put into a kitchen to cat 
Beetles will in due time die of starvation, and tlicn most probably 
tlio Beetles will eat them. Certainly ours never eat anything but 
vegetable food. But a Tortoise in a neighbouring garden does 
every morning consume a very substantial rpiantity of bread and 
milk, or rather bread well-.soaked in milk, and lie appears to thrive 
well upon it. Our Tortoises never drink water, and are decidedly 
not tempted to drink by milk being offered to them. 
Whatever the season, the Tortoises retire very early to bed. 
The warmth and sunniness of the day appear to regulate the 
c.xact time, but they rarely remain up after three or four o’clock, 
and in the cooler seasons, or on dull days, they retire much earlier. 
They will go day after day to the same warm and leafy nook ; 
and they have a habit on rising in the morning of simply turning out 
of bod, and lying for a time just outside of their bed-place, with 
their heads stupidlj' stretched out, or staring vacantly up into the 
air, before entering upon the serious business of the day.* 
I should say their Memory is very strong. I have said they 
remember persons. They remember places they know, and if 
carried away will march straight off and back again to the place 
they wish to go to ; and what is more remarkable, when 
brought out in the spring after seven or eight months’ hybernation, 
they do exactly as they did the day before they went to sleep ; and 
will march off as direct to the old spots as if they had only had 
one day’s interregnum. 
* It is noticeable how the}’ both do the same thing, in a precisely similar 
way, at the same time, and this applies even to the attitudes they assume. 
VOL. IV. 
Y 
