The habits of the echidna are nocturnal. It generally sleeps most of the day, and comes out at dark to prowl for insects. We might at first consider this strange conduct, as the insects on which it feeds fly or crawl about during the day and hide by night. But this is just what our prickly hunter wishes. He is not content to pick up a toiling ant here, and another there. When the ants are snugly housed after sundown the echidna searches out their hills, tears open a hole in one side, thrusts in his long nose, and then running out his slim, limber tongue he twists it here and there, and the ants and their white larvæ[58] bundles are collected by scores on its viscid surface. Having gone from one ant-hill to another until its hunger is satisfied, or the morning dawns, or it grows weary, the echidna retires to its burrow or rock crevice. On the road it takes a drink of water, and makes a dessert of a liberal quantity of sand and mud. As fowls need some sharp bits of stone or shell in their gizzards to help grind up their food, the echidna seems to need in its stomach gritty material to grind the oily, insect bodies and keep them from packing. This need of some coarse substance with food is not confined to fowls and the echidna. Any sheep farmer will tell you that his sheep must be given what he calls “roughness” with their food. The “roughness” is ground or finely cut straw. If this is not given with corn and wheat, the sheep, however well fed, will become thin and weak, because their food is too rich to be well assimilated.[59] When sheep are grazed and not fed, they gather their “roughness” for themselves, in dry leaves, roots, stems, and little twigs. In disposition the echidna is sluggish; seems to have no playfulness; does not object to having its nose gently stroked, but makes no friends, and except for its wonderful construction is not an interesting creature. In Tasmania there is the short-spined echidna, which has much shorter and weaker spines and much thicker fur than the one just described. In 1877 a new species living on a mountain thirty-five hundred feet high was discovered in New Guinea. It also had fewer spines and thicker, rougher fur. This mountaineer of the echidna family is much larger than his relatives of lower regions. No fossil remains of any great age have been found to prove that these animals are of distant antiquity. We cannot tell in what age they entered into existence. No remains of types connecting them with lower vertebrates on the one hand, or higher mammals on the other, have been discovered. The only fossil portion of an echidna that has been thus far secured is a shoulder-bone, found in a bed of bones belonging to extinct species of marsupial, or pouched animals. This shoulder-bone indicated an animal larger than any living echidna.