filled with warriors. I have patiently listened
to long accounts of the locomotive powers of
the whale, who will manage to swim round
the world in a fortnight. The Bengal tiger
has been quoted to me as a blood-thirsty
animal, whose appetite it is not easy to satisfy.
But the prowess of the elephant and the
whale are nothing better than child's play in
comparison with the feats of the mole. The
Creator has employed more mechanical genius
in the construction of the hand of the mole
alone, than in framing the skeletons of all
other giants of land and water. The Bengal
tiger is a lizard of sobriety and a lamb of
gentleness, when considered side by side with
the mole; for the Bengal tiger has never
turned the point of its canines against its own
flesh and blood. Send your friend a present
of a couple of tigers shut up in a box; they
will reach their address without accident or
injury. Place two moles in the same position,
and they will have swallowed each other
completely up, before they get to the first
baiting-place.

It is not a particularly difficult task to
move, either like the elephant, on the surface
of the soil, or as the whale does, in a fluid
medium which causes you to rise or to sink,
according to the compression or expansion of
your lungs; but, for experiment's sake, just
put an elephant or a whale fifty feet underground,
and see what will be the result of
the most desperate efforts of the cetacean or
the proboscid! They will both perish in a
minute or two, for want of pick-axes to cleave
the earth, and of muscles strong enough to
work them with. Give the mole the stature
of the whale, or only that of the elephant, and
it will turn the very world topsy-turvy. The
muscular superiority of the mole to the
elephant is one of those acknowledged truths
which there is no disputing.

The jaws of the mole are furnished with
forty-four formidable teeth. Its snout,
the index of passionate sensuality, has attained
to such a disproportionate size as to
have almost completely obstructed the sense
of sight (the sense, according to the author's
theory, of charity). The mole moves its
head, and the pulverised earth is thrown
suddenly into the air, like sea-water spurting
out from the nostrils of the whale. Its
stomach is an ever-burning furnace, in
which the most indigestible elements are
instantly twisted up, melted, and made to
disappear. Its hunger is a madness; its love
an epilepsy. Its whole existence is a continued
orgy of blood. Its fits of insane
appetite recur three or four times a day. It
dies of inanition at the end of a ten hours'
abstinence.

The mole darts on its prey with a prodigious
bound, seizes it under the belly,
thrusts its long muzzle into its entrails,
enlarges the wound with its hands in order
to plunge more completely into the heart of
its victim, and enjoy the carnage with every
pore. Each murder it commits furnishes
the occasion of a voluptuous ecstasy. A
famished mole once darted upon the bosom
of a young girl, and laid open her breast,
before any one had time to run to her assistance.
If the ancients had known the mole,
it is more than probable that they would
have consecrated it to Priapus, the god of
gardens. The mole forms no exception to the
common saying, that love is blind.

After all this, it is kind of M. Toussenel
to comfort us with the remark that an
animal like the mole cannot be the emblem
of any individual human type. The mole, in
fact, is not the emblem of a single character;
it is the emblem of an entire social period,
the period of the child-birth of industry,
the Cyclopean period, the most dolorous
and dark of all the periods of the limbic
phase. The mole does not symbolise any
single vice, it symbolizes them all. It is
the most complete allegorical expression
of the absolute predominance of brutal
over intellectual strength. It carries its
characterial dominant written on its snout.
And, observe here, the irresistible and fatal
result and influence ot the exaggerated
development of the olfactory apparatus in
animals. The elephant, naturally placed at
the head of the category of proboscideans,
is exclusively herbivorous, and would readily
symbolise, by his frugality and reserve,
the innocent and modest manners of the
paradisiac period. Nevertheless, because he
carries a trunk—because he is, in that respect,
related to the tapir and the mole—the elephant
is subject to outbreaks of temperament,
which sometimes render his society so insupportable,
that we are obliged to make use of
fire-arms in order to part company with him.
It is also notorious that he addicts himself
to drink, without heed or remorse; and it is
well known to what a state of moral degradation
the passion of drunkenness reduces
the unfortunates of whom it once has taken
possession.

The mole is a vessel brim-full of impurity.
Take equal parts of Bluebeard, Louis XV.,
Messalina, and the Marquis de Sade; bray
them well together in a mortar, heat and
distil them, and you will obtain the mole.
The Titan who piles Pelion upon Ossa. Enceladus
whose convulsions nauseate Ætna
so terribly that it vomits torrents of burning
lava, are the mole; who ever heaps mountain
upon mountain. who ever disturbs and distresses
the entrails of the soil, and who ever
disfigures the verdant surface of the meadows
with multitudinous earthy eruptions, is the
mole. The mole is the one-eyed Cyclops who
works underground, who opens subterranean
galleries, who feasts on living flesh, who
crushes Galathea's lovers under boulders of
rock, and who looks upon every orgy as
insipid, unless blood flows there in streams.
Where, unless in the hideous Cyclops, can we
find the portrait of the mole ?