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TURTLE KNOWS THE WAY 
HOME. 
NEW JERSEY MAN CONVINCED BY 
RESULTS OF EXPERIMENTS 
Milford, N. J. — That the common 
land turtle has a homing instinct quite 
as keen as the carrier pigeon is the be- 
lief of Wilson Rittenhouse after six 
years of experiments conducted with 
a turtle that for years had inhabited the 
Rittenhouse garden and vicinity. One 
day Rittenhouse decided that he didn’t 
want the turtle around, so he took it 
out on his mail route and dropped it 
near Mount Pleasant. A fortnight later 
it had covered the intervening miles 
and was back in the garden. 
Interested by the turtle’s achieve- 
ment. Rittenhouse marked it afresh and 
took it to a farm near French town. A 
few weeks later it was “at home” again 
in the garden. 
Four years ago Rittenhouse decided 
he would give the turtle a more difficult 
test. He carried it across the Delaware 
River four miles from his home. He 
added still more definite marks to its 
shell and liberated it. The summer 
passed and the turtle did not return. 
But this week Mrs. Rittenhouse saw a 
familiar object crawling up the garden 
path. The marks on its shell clearly 
identified it as the old turtle, returned 
after four years’ absence. — “Philadel- 
phia Record.” 
The foregoing newspaper clipping 
was sent to Mr. Rittenhouse and he 
replied as follows : 
“The turtle story is true. I did not 
expect to experiment with it when I 
started but this is how it came about : 
“We have a fairly large garden, and 
each year raise a good many tomatoes. 
One dav Mrs. Rittenhouse noticed 
something had been eating some of the 
tomatoes- and thought it was the 
chickens. I could not find any place in 
the fence where the chickens could get 
into the garden, but still something 
kept eating the tomatoes. One day she 
found a turtle eating one of them and 
then we knew. I did not like to harm 
a turtle so I put it in my mail wagon 
and took it one and one-half miles on 
my route and dropped it by the road- 
side, never expecting to see it again. 
But in about two weeks Mrs. Ritten- 
house again found a turtle at the to- 
matoes and said she believed it to be 
the same one. I said that it could not 
be possible, though it looked like the 
same one. I decided to try it again. I 
cut a mark on the bottom shell and took 
it over the same route, putting it out 
at the same place. In about two weeks 
it was back at the tomatoes again. We 
knew it was the same one by the mark 
I had put on it. 
“Then I began to be curious and took 
it one -and one-half miles away in an- 
other direction. By that time it was get- 
ting late in the season and we did not 
see it again that year, but the next year 
we found it back in the garden at its old 
job — tomatoes. We could hardly be- 
lieve it possible, but there were the 
marks. We put it in a box for a few 
days until we went to call on a friend 
across the river in Pennsylvania. We 
crossed the Delaware River bridge into 
Pennsylvania and after going five miles 
down the river, just before reaching our 
friend’s home. I put it out by the road- 
side- saying. “Now I guess you won’t 
get back again.” Before starting on 
this trip, however, I put more marks on 
it so as to be sure I would know that 
turtle if it should come back, although 
I did not expect it to do so. Four years 
passed and we had almost forgotten it 
when again Mrs. Rittenhouse found it 
in the garden. Of course we thought 
it wonderful. I told the editor of our 
town paper about it and he published 
a notice of the matter, which was copied 
by other papers. 
“It was not a common land turtle but 
brown in color with a flat bottom like 
a terrapin, which accounts for its cross- 
ing the river I think. We kept it until 
