On some cutaneous nerve-terminations in mammals / by George Hoggan and Frances Elizabeth Hoggan ; communicated by James Murie.

  • Hoggan, George
Date:
[1882]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On some cutaneous nerve-terminations in mammals / by George Hoggan and Frances Elizabeth Hoggan ; communicated by James Murie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    outer end of eacb straw a small paper flag was so placed that it would inevitably fall when the lower end was touched. When all was ready, the experimenter blew a fearful blast through a trumpet at one end of the burrow, the Mole being at the other; and as, one after another, the flags fell almost simultaneously, this was supposed to be due to the passage of the frightened animal towards its fortress at a rate of speed equal to a horse going at full trot. Less sanguine minds may, however, only attri- bute the fidling of tlie flags to the blast of air from the trumpet, or to the vibration in the air due to the same cause, and acting with great force in the narrow channel. At all events, it is simply ridiculous to compare the speed of a Mole in his burrow to that of a horse at full trot. The conformation of the fore feet, even if the observer had never seen a Mole try to run away, would in itself show that they were not adapted for speed; in fact, every thing in them is adapted for digging, and for nothing else. Their efficacy was shown by our Mole thus :—It began in the corner of its home (tlie last locality Rodents would attack ; for they always choose projecting localities for gnawing), just where the three boards or planes met at right angles to each other and furnished it with a point d'appui for its peculiarly adjusted hands. In less than two hours it had scraped a hole right through tlie inch-thick boards. The nails seemed to act like a coarse rasp in making fragments of wood fly off; and so eagerly did it work that it resisted viciously when we attempted to pull it away ; and when released, it rushed back to the spot, and began anew, rasping with desperate eagerness. According to our observations, the Mole uses its fore paws for holding its prey while it is being devoured ; but their merely digging-adaptation renders their action during feeding rather awkward. When given a worm, this was always held between the backs of the hands or, rather, thumbs; and, beginning at one end, the worm was passed into the moutli by a series of hitches of the fore paws, until devoured. On examining the backs of those paws for nerve-endings, we could only find the endings of nerves on the short tactile hairs with which the back of the hand was studded. These short bristly stumps, while they gave an exquisite sense of touch, were probably better adapted for holding the slippery worms than a naked epidermis would have been. The sense of bearing is supposed to be very keen in the Mole,
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