TOOTHLESS ANT-EATERS 
265 
which stick to it, and are finally returned with it into the mouth. This 
goes on over and over again, until the appetite is satisfied; and appar¬ 
ently the diet is excellent, for the ant-eater is generally fat, and indeed 
his hams are appreciated as a delicacy for their peculiar flavor, into 
which that of formic acid obtained from the ant is said to enter. 
The Elephant Shrews. —The elephant shrews are found in 
Africa. The snout is prolonged into a kind of proboscis, which 
accounts for the popular name. The hind-legs are more developed 
than the fore-limbs, and they advance by a succession of leaps, just 
resembling the jerboas, and causing some writers to call them jumping 
shrews. The common elephant shrew, from South Africa, is about 
eight inches long, of which the tail takes up three inches. The color 
is tawny-brown, becoming whitish on the limbs. It is active by day, 
and lives in burrows, to which it retreats on being disturbed. There 
are several other species. 
The shrews constitute a numerous family of mouse-like or rat¬ 
like creatures, spread over the Old World and North America. The 
snout is long and pointed, the body mouse-like, and the tail thick and 
tapering, and more or less densely set with hairs. Many of them are 
furnished with glands which secrete a strong-smelling fluid. 
The Common Shrew is about two and three-quarter inches 
long, with a tail rather more than one and one-half inches. It feeds on 
insects, worms, small snails and slugs; and it is preyed upon by barn 
owls and weasels. It is said a cat will kill but not eat them, owing 
to their strong-smelling glands. In the autumn great numbers of 
these little creatures are found dead, without apparent injury, on roads 
and footpaths in the country—probably starved. 
Some old superstitions still linger around the shrew, which is, or 
was till very recently, credited with causing cattle to fall lame if it 
' ran over their backs, while its bite made them “swell at the heart and 
die/’ The only cure was to stroke the part affected or bitten with a 
twig from a shrew-ash—that is, an ash-tree, into which a hole had 
been bored with an auger, and a shrew plugged up alive in the hole. 
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