“Had this animal an exceptional appetite, a taste for unusual things, that it should have preferred to die of hunger rather than touch vegetable food? Not at all; it merely followed the preferences of all its kind. Many other experiments have been performed both by Flourens and by other observers. All the moles they have tried to feed with vegetable substances—with bread, lettuce, cabbages, roots, herbage of any description—have starved to death without touching their provisions. On the other hand, those that were fed with raw flesh, worms, larvæ, and insects of various kinds, remained alive. “Another very simple way to determine positively the kind of food eaten by this animal is to examine the contents of its stomach as it lives in the freedom of its customary haunts. Everything eaten by it must find its way to the stomach. Let us catch a mole, cut it open, and investigate. The stomach is found to contain, sometimes, red pieces of common earthworms, or it may be a pap of beetles, recognizable from the scaly remains that have not been digested; or still again, and rather oftener, we find a marmalade of larvæ, especially the larvæ of June-bugs—undigested bits of mandibles and the hard shell of the skull. In short, one is likely to come upon a mixed hash of all the small creatures inhabiting the soil, such as wood-lice, millipeds, cutworms, moths in the chrysalis state, caterpillars, and subterranean nymphs; but no matter how carefully we search we cannot find a bit of vegetable matter. “All possible observation points to the same conclusion: despite what is believed by so many it is certain that the mole’s diet is confined to animal substances. And could it, I ask you, be otherwise? Would the stomach’s contents belie the savage set of teeth you have just seen in the picture? Do not its teeth show that it is a flesh-eater?