It is very difficult to watch the movements and discover the feeding-time, or what he feeds on, of an animal which lives almost wholly underground in the daytime; but I am pretty sure these tunnels are made for and used as roadways, or underground trails for the purpose of hunting. He is a night-feeder, and exposed to terrible perils from the various small carnivora that prowl about like bandits in the dark—stoats, weasels, martens, and skunks. So, to avoid and escape these enemies, he comes quietly along the subterranean roadways, and cautiously emerging at the open cutting, feels about with his wonderful nose; and I doubt not, guided by an acute sense of smell, pounces upon larvæ, slugs, beetles, or any nocturnal creeping-thing he can catch; and so traversing his different hunting-trails during the night, manages in that way to fare sumptuously, and safe from danger. Turning in, to sleep away his breakfast, dinner, and supper, at the first peep of the grey morning, he dozes on, until hunger again prompts him to make another excursion on the ‘hunting-path.’ It is scarcely possible to imagine a more skilfully-contrived hunting-system, to avoid danger and facilitate escape, than are these tunnel-trails with open cuttings; for the sly little hunter has, on the slightest alarm, two means of flight at his disposal—one before and another behind him; and the fur, as I have already mentioned, laying as evenly when smoothed from tail to head as it does when turned in the natural direction, enables him to turn astern, and retreat tail-first into his hole as easily as he could go head-first. When we contemplate this grotesque and strangely-formed little creature, and see how wisely and wonderfully it is fashioned and adapted to its destined place, supplying another missing link in the great chain of Nature, we cannot but feel God’s power and omnipresence. Feeding in the dark and living in the dark, eyes would have been superfluous; sound, save from vibration in the earth, or when hunting at the open cuttings, would seldom reach this tiny _hermit_; hence the hearing organs have no external appendage for catching sounds, and are but in a rudimentary form. Hands fashioned into marvellous digging-tools, and hind-feet turned into scrapers, for getting rid of the rubble dug out with the hands, and nose possessing smell and touch in their most exquisite forms, these serve him for guides of unerring certainty and undeviating precision through his darksome wanderings. CHAPTER XIII. THE APLODONTIA LEPORINA. (RICH.) (_Sewellel or Show’tl of the Nesqually Indians._) SYNONYMS.—_Aplodontia leporina_, Rich., F.B.A. i. 211, plate xviii.; Aud. Bach. N.A. Qua. iii., 1853, 99, pl. cxxiii.; _Hoplodon leporinus_, Wagler System, Amh., 1830; _Anisonyx rufa_, Rafinesque, Am. Month. Mag. ii. 1817; _Arctomys rufa_, Harlan, F. Am, 1825, 308; _Sewellel_, Lewis and Clark’s Travels, ii. 1815, 176.