Some of these marine forms are carnivorous, living on fish, mollusks and crustaceans, while others are strictly vegetarians, subsisting only on roots and the various sea-weeds. The flesh of some is rich and delicious, and a favorite and costly article of food, but of others it is coarse and illflavored, and necessarily not edible. The eggs, however, are always sweet, good and wholesome food.

Valuable articles of commerce, such as boxes, cases, knife-handles, jewelry and other delicate ornaments, are made from the shell, for it is susceptible of a very high polish, which brings out with surprising clearness its rich brown and golden shades and markings.

Next to the sea-living turtles, come the fresh-water species, which eat both animal and vegetable foods. They enjoy much better than aught else a bed of soft mud, their heads lifted above the surface of the stagnant water, their long necks moving snake-like as they gulp in mouthful after mouthful of air. They are generally gregarious in habits, large numbers often being found huddled together in the sun on logs or banks, close to the water, into which they quickly slide upon the first intimation of danger. Timid as they are, yet they will snap and bite most furiously when taken in the hand.

Salt- and fresh-water terrapins are varieties of turtle, although some scientists restrict the latter term to marine animals that do not hibernate, and that cannot draw their head and feet inside the shell. The tortoise never goes to sea they say, can draw himself within his shell, although the Box Tortoise only can close the shell fast when thus withdrawn, and finally, that the tortoise hibernates. Some of the best and latest writers on the subject call all these animals turtles, applying the name tortoise only to the familiar Box Tortoise of the wood.

Awkward as turtles appear in their box-like covering, yet they can walk rapidly on land, are climbers of some note, and all are able to swim. The head, neck, and legs of a turtle

himself making a fresh attack upon another species in a little opening in the woods.

Very amusing it was to watch him, as with praiseworthy deliberation he ate round after round of the cap of the fungus. He would bite off a mouthful of the toadstool, chew it carefully until he had extracted the whole of the juice, then open his mouth and drop out the masticated fibre, and take a fresh mouthful, not biting inward toward the stem, but breaking off the morsel next beside that which he had just eaten. He paced round and round the fungus as he took his bites, and as the fungus decreased in regular circles, the chewed fragments increased. In less than an hour he had eaten all the disk of the fungus to the stipe, and then walked slowly away to seek for another. The discarded parts of the fungus appeared quite dry when examined, nothing nutritious being left in them. There must have been some very good reason for rejecting the central part and the stem, which were left in every instance,

are of a bronze, blackish green, or deep-brown color, and the shells are beautifully marked, glossy, ridged, or carved, and made up of closely-united, many-sided plates, arranged upon a thickened, lighter-colored and apparently uniform bony plate, which is capable of being separated into many independent pieces. The shell, or epidermic covering, is not brittle and lime-like, as the shells of all mollusks are, but is of the nature of horn. In general the plastron is of a lighter color than the carapace, being light-brown, yellow or cream, with yellowish lines dividing the plates, and with bordering bands of red, yellow and purple. The upper plate is usually of a very dark color, marked and lined with darker and lighter tints, and often displaying a bevelled yellow edge. Chrysemys picta, the Painted Turtle, receives his name from the beauty of his many-colored shell, while the Spotted Turtle, Nanemys guttatus, which is often called the Wood Turtle, is distinguished by the round yellow spots that are regularly distributed over his dark-colored

carapace.

But of all our turtles none is so well known or so interesting in his ways as the Common Box Tortoise-Cistudo clausa. He affects dry woods, and dislikes the water, and is a long-lived creature, some individuals having been known to live more than a hundred years. Box Tortoises in confinement have been found to eat meat, insects and bread and milk from the hand, but if berries were put into their mouths they wiped them out in a very funny manner with their front feet, which they used after the fashion of a hand.

When foraging in the woods, especially during the rainy season, at which time manifold varieties of fungi prevail, they make their meals largely upon these plants. We have seen a huge toadstool that had been gnawed off so evenly, the central pillar only being left intact, that appeared as though it had been cut away by a knife. This had been the work of the Box Tortoise, for on looking around we soon descried, moving leisurely over the leaf-strewn earth, the creature