“Yes, the mole eats flesh and nothing else; everything proves this. Besides, remember its big appetite, if one may call appetite the raging demands of a stomach that in twelve hours requires a quantity of food equal to the weight of the animal. The mole’s existence is a gluttonous frenzy. This frenzy seizes the creature three or four times a day, and it dies of starvation if it has to go without food for more than a few hours. To satisfy its appetite, when its food melts away and disappears almost as soon as swallowed, what can the mole count on? Live sparrows, which it devoured with such zest in the experiments of Flourens, are evidently not for a hunter that burrows underground; at most, some stray frog, found in the field, may fall into its clutches. What, then, is left for it to count on? The larvæ buried underground, and especially those of the June-bug, tender and fat as bacon. That is very little, I admit, for such hunger; but the number to be had will make up for the smallness of the prey. What a slaughter of white worms must take place when the soil abounds in this small game! Scarcely is one meal finished when another begins, and each time, no doubt, other small insects are eaten by the dozen. To free a field of these destroyers of our crops there is no helper equal to the mole. “A valued destroyer of vermin—that is what we defend when we take the mole’s part and give to it, even if somewhat reluctantly, the honorable title of helper. That title, in truth, it only partly deserves. To catch the crickets, the larvæ, the white worms, and the insects of all kinds that it feeds on, the mole is obliged to disturb the roots amid which its prey is to be found. Many that interfere with it in its work are cut; plants have their roots laid bare and are even uprooted altogether; and, finally, the earth dug up by this untiring miner is piled on the surface in little mounds or mole-hills. With such upturning of the soil a field of vegetables may be speedily ruined and a crop of grain badly damaged. One night is enough for a mole to undermine a large tract; for the famished creature is singularly quick in boring the soil where it hopes to find something to eat.