His head is also very much like a turtle's. When alarmed he draws his head and feet into his shell and remains quiet. He is a very peaceful animal. I have never known one to bite anybody nor anything else. The gopher lives in the ground, burrowing a molelike passage several hundred feet long. There is no use trying to dig for one. It would take a week of the hardest kind of work to reach the bottom of his tunnel.
He comes out every day about noon for his meals. He eats grass, weeds, clover, etc., for his regular meals; but when he finds a farm with pease, beans, and other vegetables, unless he is discovered in time he will do a great deal of damage, for he eats such things voraciously. In raising their young the female lays from five to six eggs in the dirt she has thrown out when digging her tunnel. She buries them, and in a few weeks hatches out a great number of the cutest little things you ever saw. They do not stay with their mother, but go immediately to forming a little burrow for themselves, which is from five to six feet deep. They can live a long time without any food whatever. Their flesh is also eatable, tasting somewhat like chicken. May I write again?
Down here we have a great variety of fruit. We have blackberries nearly all the year round. They commence in March and last until about the end of November. All are what we call wild in the States. Indians peddle them in big baskets on their backs. They are a great deal smaller than yours, and can only be eaten when cooked. I would like to exchange Mexican postage and revenue stamps with some Knights of the Round Table.
ROBERT L. MILLER, JUN. P. O. Box 319, MEXICO CITY, MEXICO.
A California member asks how to fix paper money so that it may be examined without having to take it out of envelopes each time. There are two ways of mounting your specimens. The first and most difficult is to take very stiff paper and make a leaf with an opening of the exact size, like the opening in a photograph album leaf. Mucilage the tiniest edge all around, and press till thoroughly dry.
The other way is to cover the four corners, but this prevents the back from being seen. An ideal way would be to have two specimens--one to mount one side front, the other the other side. Rare manuscripts are mounted according to the first method, and then the heavy albumlike leaves are bound into a book.