Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/682

664 enduring severe cold. The sub-family Soricina is the only one represented in North America; other sub-families are found in Europe, Asia, the East Indies, and in south and central Africa; none as yet have been detected in South America. Most of the American species belong to the genus Sorex (Linnæus). Prof. Spencer F. Baird described twelve species, varying in length from three to four and a half inches, in Vol. VIII of the Pacific Railroad Reports. In color they range from blackish and brownish to grayish above and lighter to whitish beneath. Most of the species belong on the Pacific coast or in the Northwestern States and Territories. The S. personatus is the least of the American shrews, and among the smallest of the quadrupeds of this country, being not. quite three inches long; it belongs in the South Atlantic States. In the genus Blarina (Gray) the body is stout, the tail shorter than the head; the skull is short and broad, and the fore-paws are large in proportion to the hind-paws. This genus is peculiar to America. The mole shrew (B. talpoides, Gray), the largest of the American shrews, four and a half inches long, is found from Nova Scotia to Lake Superior, and southward to Georgia. It is dark, ashy gray above and paler below, with whitish feet. Several other species are described by Baird, of which two are in Mexico and Texas.

Four species of shrew are mentioned by Wood as inhabiting the British Isles: the erd shrew, the water shrew, the oared shrew, and the rustic shrew. The erd shrew, also called the shrew mouse, is the common shrew of England, and is found also all over Europe, Unlike most animals, they are often found dead; though, owing to their nocturnal habits, they are seldom seen alive. Aubyn Battye writes in "Longman's Magazine": "Every countryman is familiar with the sight of shrew mice lying dead on autumn footpaths and by sides of roads. The hot, dry English September weather presses very hardly on this class of animals. Worms retire then a long way below ground, and even the strong mole often can not follow them in the hard-baked ground, and has to trust to slugs for maintenance. The damp, dead leaves of the hedge-bottom, which were once the shrew's best hunting-ground, are dry and deserted now—a fatal change of things. Yes, dead we often see the shrew; and picking him up we hold in