TORTOISE. 
5 
shorter than the legs, and covered with small scales 
which terminate in a hard pointed tip. 
The agreeable manner in which Mr. White, in 
his History of Selborne, has detailed the manners of 
this little animal in its domestic state, will be a suf- 
ficient apology for inserting the account in his own 
words. “A land tortoise,” says this gentleman, 
“ which has been kept thirty years in a little walled 
court, retires under ground about the middle of 
November, and comes forth again about the middle 
of April. When it first appears in the spring, it 
discovers very little inclination for food ; but in the 
height of summer grows voracious ; and then, as the 
summer declines, its appetite declines ; so that for 
the last weeks in autumn it hardly eats at all. Milky 
plants, such as lettuces, dandelions, sow-thistles, 
&c., are its principal food. On the first of Novem- 
ber, 1771, I remarked that the tortoise began to 
dig the ground in order to form its hybernaculum 
which it had fixed on just beside a great tuft of 
hepaticas. It scrapes out the ground with its fore 
feet, and throws it up over its back with its hind ; 
but the motion of its legs is ridiculously slow, 
little exceeding the hour-hand of a clock. Nothing 
can be more assiduous than this creature night and 
day, in scooping the earth, and forcing its greats 
body into the cavity. But as the noons of that sea- 
son prove unusually warm and sunny, it was con- 
stantly interrupted, and called forth by the heat in 
the middle of the day; and though I continued 
there till the thirteenth of November, yet the work 
