Page:The Zoologist, 3rd series, vol 2 (1878).djvu/192

170 Shakspeare also makes use of the word urchin as an adjective when he speaks of a "grim and urchin-snouted boar" (Venus and Adonis, stanza 185).

We now come to one of the most useful, though one of the most persecuted, of British mammals—"The blind Mole," which "casts copp'd hills towards heaven" (Pericles, Act i., S( ene 1).

When will occupiers of land learn to know that the beautiful verdure of their parks and pastures is mainly preserved by Moles, whose chief food consists of the larvae of Coleopterous and Lepidopterous insects, besides worms and slugs. The hillocks, which to many appear so unsightly, should never remain long enough for the grass to go through them. No artificial manure, costing, say, ten times as much as the labour of spreading the fresh hillocks evenly over the grass, will produce anything like so good a crop of grass. I have tried it for years, and can speak from experience. Besides it should be borne in mind that the most expensive topdressings will not destroy the insect enemy at work at the roots of the grass, even if applied thick enough to kill the grass itself! Surely, then, it is far better and far more economical to manure the ground with the hillocks themselves.

Shakspeare was well acquainted with the acute sense of hearing in the Mole. He makes Caliban say—

In the first part of Henry IV. (Act iii., Scene 1), Hotspur complains—

As an epithet the name "Mole" was well applied by Hamlet to the ghost of his father—