One of the great objections urged to more hedge-row fences than are necessary, is that of harbouring _Vermin_; it therefore becomes necessary to inquire into the history of those creatures designated by a name everywhere held in reproach. The meaning of the term vermin has not been very accurately defined. Johnson considers “any noxious animal” to belong to vermin; whilst Bailey, anxious to be more specific, defines vermin to be “any kind of hurtful creature or insect, as rats, mice, lice, fleas, bugs, &c.;” but whatever lexicographers may say upon the subject, there can be no doubt that, in country language, what are known as noxious animals are distinguished from noxious insects, the first being in most counties known as “Varment,” to which belong rats, mice, stoats, &c., to which the keeper would add kites, hawks, owls, magpies, and other birds; the second term being limited to those parasitic creatures by which both man and some inferior animals may be attacked. The farmer’s notion of vermin, as applied to the hedge-row, differs from these, as it includes all beasts, birds, reptiles, insects, &c., which directly injure the hedge, together with such as choose the hedge-row or the bank on which it might be grown as a breeding-place, from which they migrate to farm crops, and so become injurious, not to the hedge alone, but to the farm in general. Some notion of these may be inferred from the following list:— 1. _Rabbits_—By burrowing in the hedge-bank. 2. _Hedge-hog_—Ignorantly included with hedge-row vermin by the farmer. 3. {_Stoats_} These burrow or make the hedge-row or bank {_Rats_ } a place of refuge and concealment. {_Mice_ } 4. _Snakes_—Erroneously supposed to be injurious. 5. {_Slugs_ } Both breed extensively in hedge-rows, which {_Snails_} often form these hybernacula. {_Insects_ injurious to the growing hedge-plants. { _Do._ protected by the hedge, and migrating to the 6. { farm crops. { _Do._ harboured by hedge-row weeds, and thence { migrating to the crops. 7. _Birds_ in general, according to the dictum of the Sparrow Clubbists. 1. The rabbit is one of the greatest pests to the bank on which hedges are too often grown, and therefore is injurious to the growing hedge, to say nothing of the mischief which these creatures do to the crops. The other day we visited a field in which a hedge-bank had been undermined with no less than fifty holes in the distance of five-and-twenty yards; these ramified in every direction, not only through the raised mound, but into the fields on either side of the hedge, and out of which rabbits were dug from a depth of as much as four feet. Here the ridiculous nature of the mound was the primary cause of the mischief, and hence we here offer an illustration of the general facts which met our view:— [Illustration: _Diagram of a Mound and Ditch in Oolite Sands._