The =Shrews= (_Sorex_) are small animals with a superficial resemblance to mice, with slender soft-haired bodies, small eyes, and tolerably long, thickly haired tails. Shrews are extremely voracious, eating daily more than their own weight of food, and destroying an enormous quantity of subterranean vermin. They live in underground passages, not usually made by themselves, but dug out by field-voles. They smell strongly of musk, secreted by two glands in the hinder part of the body. The blackish brown Shrew-mouse, or =Common Shrew= (_Sorex vulgaris_), and the =Lesser Shrew= (_Sorex pygmœus_), only about two inches long, kill, in the cornfields, gardens, or woodland, an enormous quantity of noxious insects found in the earth, together with their larvæ; also snails and worms, and sometimes field-voles, and are in the highest degree serviceable. But the larger (up to 3½ inches long), black =Water Shrew= (_Sorex fodiens_), although serviceable on land in the same way as the other kinds, is very injurious to fishing and fish-breeding, since it devours the small fish and kills the larger ones, eating out their eyes and brains. [Illustration: FIG. 17.—The Common Shrew (_Sorex vulgaris_). ] The =Mole= (_Talpa europœa_). Body thick, cylindrical. Legs short, fore legs broad and spade-like, with broad digging claws. Eyes small, scarcely visible among the fur. No external ears; the auditory opening can be completely closed by a fold of skin. Shining black fur. The mole is found in every soil inhabited by insects and earthworms, provided it is not too stiff, but yet sufficiently coherent to dig passages in, which will not at once collapse. Its presence is known by the heaps which it throws up. The nest, however, is always found under a larger heap, frequently hidden under tree roots, walls, etc., though sometimes in the open field. It consists in the first place of a nearly round dwelling-chamber, softly upholstered with vegetable substances; this is surrounded by a labyrinth of passages. From the nest a passage runs to the mole’s hunting-ground. The walls of this passage of the labyrinth, and of the nest, are hard. The wider and subterranean channels, which the mole digs out when it is simply catching insects in the soil, easily fall in again, and the animal takes no pains to compact their walls. The highway to the hunting-ground, in which the animal can progress very rapidly, can be at once detected, not like the ordinary passages by a small chain of mole-hills composed of the thrown-up earth, but by a depression, since in its preparation the earth is laterally compressed and not thrown out. This tube is shorter or longer according as the hunting-ground is in the immediate neighbourhood or further off; it may be 100 or 160 feet long. The mole sleeps in the nest during the time not employed in seeking for food, and goes three times a day on the hunt for insects (early morning, midday, and before sunset in the evening).