resembles the preceding species in its habits, but feeds rather on fruits and roots than on herbage, and is far more addicted to a diet of animal food, freely devouring insects, worms, snails, and even young birds and carrion. It is pretty generally distributed over Europe, but not so uniformly as the Field Vole, which it even exceeds in fecundity, the females producing from four to eight young three or four times in the year, in a nest constructed of grass and moss placed in a hollow of the surface of the ground among dense herbage. [Illustration: SOUTHERN FIELD VOLE.] The Continent of Europe is inhabited by several other species of Voles, among which we may notice the little SOUTHERN FIELD VOLE (_Arvicola arvalis_), which more or less completely takes the place of our common Field Vole in Southern Europe, but also extends over the whole of Central Europe, and into Western Asia. Several of these species, and others to which we cannot specially refer, ascend to considerable elevations on the mountain-sides, but at least one species, the SNOW MOUSE (_Arvicola nivalis_), lives on the Alps and Pyrenees, at elevations of 4,000 feet and upwards, being most abundant about the limit of perpetual snow, where it not only resides during the short period of summer, when some portion of the surface is freed from its snowy covering, but actually throughout the winter, buried under the snow, through which it makes its way in search of the roots of plants. The ROOT VOLE (_Arvicola œconomus_) is a large and abundant Siberian species, the range of which extends from the Obi to Kamstchatka. This and some other northern species often migrate in great bodies, after the fashion to which we shall have to refer when speaking of the Lemmings. In North America, it would appear from Dr. Coues’ monograph, there are about a dozen distinct species of Voles. One of them, confined to the northern parts of the Continent, he identifies with the _Arvicola rutilus_ of the Old World, which he regards as a circumpolar species. South of a line running from sea to sea, a little north of the boundary of the United States, comes another form, _A. Gapperi_, which is regarded as a sub-species of _A. rutilus_, to which _A. glareolus_ (_see_ p. 116) is considered to stand in a similar relation. The most abundant North American species is the MEADOW MOUSE (_A. riparius_), which is distributed, apparently, over the greater part of the Continent, and takes the place of the Field Vole. On the prairies there is a peculiar species (_A. austerus_), a sub-species of which (_A. curtatus_) is found in the Western territories as far as California; the PINE MOUSE (_A. pinetorum_) inhabits the country east of the Mississippi; and the genus is represented in Mexico by one species (_A. quasiater_). The Voles are most numerous and abundant in the northern and north-western parts of North America.