Note 33 — PETER KALM’s TRAVELS. (continued 3)

These walks are inhabited by a kind of mole,33 which I intend to describe more accurately in another work. Their food is commonly roots: I have observed the following qualities in one which was caught. It had greater stiffness and strength in its legs, than I ever observed in other animals in proportion to their size. Whenever it intended to dig, it held its legs obliquely, like oars, I laid my handkerchief before it, and it began to stir in it with the snout, and taking away the handkerchief to see what it had done to it, I found that in the space of a minute it had made it full of holes, and it looked as if it had been pierced very much by an awl. I was obliged to put some books on the cover of the box in which I kept this animal, or else it was flung off immediately. It was very irascible, and would bite great holes into any thing that was put in its way; I held a steel pen-case to it, it at first bit at it with great violence, but having felt its hardness, it would not venture again to bite at any thing. These moles do not make such hills as the European ones, but only such walks as I have already described.