Tortoise and Cockroach . 
301 
“ The tortoise and the hedgehog both so slow,. 
As in their motion scarce designed to go, 
Good footmen grown, contrary to their kind, 
Lest from the rest they should ‘be left behind.” 
(Noah’s Flood.) 
In onr own time we adopt Drayton’s arrangement, but 
with a difference. We give the tortoise credit for equal 
speed with the hedgehog. Quite recently a considerable 
traffic has been carried on in the London streets. Small 
African tortoises have been taken about on barrows, and 
passers-by have been beguiled into becoming purchasers 
of these little reptiles, by the assurance that one of them 
will soon clear a kitchen of black beetles. The wish. is, 
no doubt, father to the thought, and any information as 
to the purely vegetable diet of the new purchase, volun¬ 
teered by a presumptuous naturalist, is slighted. We 
smile at the absurd notions of our forefathers in matters 
of natural history, but anything more comic than the 
picture presented to the imagination by a tortoise in wild 
pursuit of a cockroach w 7 ould be difficult to find. 
A traveller in Eastern Tartary tells of “ tortoises as 
big as an oven ” (Hakluyt, vol. ii. p. 163). This simile is 
rivalled in exactness by one made use of by a farmer who 
appeared as a witness in a court of law. In reply to a 
question of counsel as to the size of some article, he said 
it was “ about as big as a bit of chalk.” The tortoises 
referred to were, no doubt, turtles. An early mention of 
the turtle, or sea tortoise, occurs in an account of Sir John 
Hawkins’s second voyage to the West Indies. The writer, 
one of the ship’s company, chronicles as follows:— 
The 5th. of July [1565] we had sight of certain islands of sand, 
called the Tortugas, which is low land [in the Gulf of Mexico] where 
the captain went in, with his pinnace; and found such a number of 
birds that, in half an hour, he laded her with them ; and, if there had 
been ten boats more, they might have done the like. These islands 
bear the name of Tortles, because of the number of them which there 
do breed: whose nature is to live both in the water and also upon land. 
