56 
MAMMALIA. 
this without any great apparent effort.” * Dr. Godman also tells us 
that one which he had “ in a basket on the mantlepiece of a parlour 
made its escape, and fell to the hearth ; apparently it sustained little 
injury by the fall, but hurried on until it reached the wall, where it 
began to travel round the room. Whenever its course was impeded 
by the feet of the chairs, which were of large size, it would not go 
round them, but wedging itself between them and the wall, pushed 
them with apparent ease iar enough to obtain a free passage, and it 
thus continued to move several in succession. What was more 
astonishing, it passed in a similar manner behind the legs of a small 
mahogany breakfast-table, and pushed it aside in the same way it 
had done the chairs, finally hiding itself behind a pile of quarto 
volumes, more than two feet high, which it also moved out from the 
wall.” f Now I have made a pile, just two feet high, of quarto 
volumes, and find that to move it on a smooth, painted floor requires 
a force of eighteen pounds (Avoirdupois), and on a carpet, of twenty- 
two pounds. In order to display a degree of strength proportionate 
to the difference in weight of the two, a man would have to exert a 
push pressure of twelve thousand pounds ! 
Its nest is commonly half a foot or more below the surface, and 
from it several passages lead away in the direction of its favorite 
foraging grounds. These primary passages gradually approach the 
surface, and finally become continuous with, or open into, an ever 
increasing multitude of tortuous galleries, which wind about in every 
direction, and sometimes come so near the surface as barely to 
escape opening upon it, while at other times they are several inches 
deep. Along the most superficial of these horizontal burrows the 
earth is actually thrown up, in the form of long ridges, by which the 
animal’s progress can be traced. The distance that they can thus 
travel in a given time is almost incredible. Audubon and Bachman 
state that they have been known, in a single night after a rain, to 
* Quadrupeds of North America, vol. I, 1846, pp. S5-86. 
f American Natural History, by John D. Godman, M. D., vol. I, 1842, p. 64. 
