But what centum lingua, what ferrea vox, would ever suffice to reconstruct the whole history of all the plants and animals I can see around me? It is easy enough to catch their episodes vaguely as one examines them ; but to write them all down in definite language is a task of which even science itself may well despair.

;

E

VI.

THE HEDGEHOG'S HOLE.

THE broken ground in the warren near Tom Fowler's cottage is full of burrows of every description, from the big badger's-nest by Chimney Rock to the rabbits' holes and tiny shrew-runs that honeycomb the soft mould beside the landslip. Among them are some which I know from the pattering tracks at the mouth or entrance to be the haunts of spiny hedgehogs-the long interval between the prints of fore and hind feet, and the deep toe-nail marks in the damp clay are quite unmistakable; and as we want a tame hedgehog to keep down the cockroaches in our lower premises I have turned out to-day,

armed with pick and shovel, to unearth and carry off one of these uncanny brutes for my kitchen folk. After a little digging in the bank, using my pick carefully for fear of injuring the poor timid beast, I have got to the round warm nest, a mere hollow in the ground roughly floored with leaves and dry moss and lined on the top with a soft vault of the same materials. And now the creature lies motionless in my shovel, rolled tightly up into a prickly ball, and absolutely unassailable in its spherical suit of sharply pointed spikearmour. No defensive mail could be more effectual or more deterrent. I cannot even lift him up to put him into my basket; I am obliged literally to shovel him in, and then tie down the flap to keep him safely. There I can see him now through the wattles, slowly unrolling himself, and peering about with his blinking, beady black eyes, as if to inquire what Arabian Nights' enchantment has so strangely transferred him against his will to this curious locomotive prison.

Hedgehogs are really very common animals in England, and yet few people have any idea of their existence among half the hedges and banks in the meadows and copses around them. The little animals lie hidden in their subterranean holes or open nests during the daytime, and only come out in search of slugs, grubs, and beetles at nightfall. Yet they are a precious heritage of our age, for all that; for they and the few other remaining members of the old insectivorous group form the last survivors of a very early and undeveloped mammalian type, the common ancestors of all our other European quadrupeds, who have diverged from them in various specialised directions. They rank as interesting middle links in that great broken but still traceable chain which connects the higher mammals with their lost and unknown semi-reptilian ancestors. Indeed, if we had never heard of the hedgehogs and their allies before, and if one were now to be brought for the first time by some intrepid explorer from Central Africa

or the Australian bush, all our biologists would be as delighted with it as they were when the ornithorhynchus and the echidna were discovered and recognised as links between the reptile and the marsupial, or when the supposed extinct fossil genus ceratodus was found alive in the rivers of Queensland, thus connecting the ganoid fishes with the transitional lepidosiren, and through it with the amphibious newts, frogs, and salamanders. The unconscious black-fellow used to devour as barramunda, and the colonist used quietly to pickle as salmon, a marvellous double-lived creature, provided with perfect gills and perfect lungs, for one specimen of which a naturalist would have given his right eye; and so too our own gipsies have been in the habit for ages of baking in a ball of earth the finest surviving representative of the most ancient placental mammalian line. They roll him up (dead, I am glad to say) in a mass of kneaded clay, which they put into the fire whole until it begins to crack;