By an instinct--the heritage of years--of a kind that prompts gamekeepers to slaughter indiscriminately eagles, hawks, crows, magpies, owls, and even squirrels, classing them with such vermin as pole-cats, stoats, weasels, and rats, ignorant farmers and gardeners wage war against the mole, asserting that in driving his tunnels he throws up unsightly heaps of soil, and, worse still, loosens and destroys the roots of plants and grass, totally ignoring the fact that Mr. _Talpa Europæa_, though he may occasionally disturb the earth around, acts as a very efficient surface drainer, and still better, is a persistent chaser and devourer of his natural prey, the wire-worm, and other injurious insects. Our Tube mole throws up no hillocks, but he is accused of being the source of much mischief, and of endangering the houses on the surface--damaging, as it were, their roots--by the vibration arising from the continual passage of trains along the iron galleries and the consequent subsidence of the ground. This has given rise to numerous complaints, so pronounced as to become the subject of an official inquiry. Some foolish objections have been raised to deep-level railways, and equally unreasonable claims for injury done by them have been brought into court. Where a vibration clause is inserted in any Tube Railway Bill, there might be ingenious claims manufactured for compensation. For instance, a watchmaker might come forward and say that the vibration caused by the railway prevented him from setting his chronometers, or a wine merchant might say that his wines were shaken up; and in this way the company might be subject to endless litigation. When it was proposed to bore tunnels 70 feet below the royal demesnes of Hyde Park, St. James’s Park, and the Green Park, and as much as 216 feet below Hampstead Heath, approximating in the former case to the height of Queen Eleanor’s memorial at Charing Cross, and in the latter to that of the twin towers of Westminster Abbey, it was at once urged by the representatives of a certain Preservation Society that the trees, plants, and flowers of the three parks would be detrimentally affected by the Tube, and that the Hampstead Heath tunnels would “very probably drain the upper surface of the soil and destroy vegetation all round.” To which unthought-out contention Mr. R. E. Middleton, a well-known civil engineer, replied that “at the depths proposed for the parks the tunnels were to be constructed through a stratum, not of loose soil, but of stiff London clay, so that any question of destroying trees, plants, or flowers was rather absurd; in fact, vegetation would in no way be affected.” He might have added the argument that, although ordinary railway tunnels abound, no one had ever heard of the overlying fields and woods being deleteriously affected by them. CLAIMS FOR DAMAGE BY TUBING