Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 June 1892 — The Fiercest Animal. [ARTICLE]

The Fiercest Animal.

‘ ‘What is the fiercest animal in the world?” asked a Washington Star writer of a zoologist. ‘ ‘The mole,” ho replied. “You are surprised, but such, in my opinion, is the fact. People ordinarily look upon the mole as n sluggish and harmless oreature, spending its life in groping blindly underground. As usual, the popular idea was a mistaken one. The mole is in reality the most ferocious and most active of animals. Imagine it magnified to the size of a tiger, and you would have a more terrible beast than the world has yet seen. Though with defective powers of vision and therefore incapable of following its prey by sight, it would be agile beyond conception, springing this way and that as it went along, leaping with lightning quickness upon any creature that in met, rending it to pieces it a moment, devouring tho yet warm and bleeding flesk and instantly seeking, with hunger insatiable, for a frosh victim. This creature would, without hesitation, devour a serpent twenty' feet in length, and so tremendous would be its voracity, that it would eat twenty or thirty such snakes hi tho course of a day. With one grusp of its teeth and a single clutch of its claws it could disembowel an ox, and, if it should happen to enter a fold of sheep or an inclosure of cattle, it would kill them all for the mere lust of slaughter. Let two such animals meet and how terrific would be the battle! Fear is a feeling which the mole seems never to entertain. In conflict with an adversary of its own kind its efforts are exclusively directed to injuring his opponent, without regard for its own protection. An examination of tho skeleton of the mole will repay your trouble, so wonderful is its adaptation of structure to its manner of It looks like a veritable machine for digging, and it has several accessory bones which are not found in any other living beast, being discovered only in certain fossil.forms.”