itself up in scrap-heaps of leaves and moss, about the end of November, trusting to good luck to be left to the enjoyment of peaceful slumber till middle of March, but if disturbed before the end of February is wide awake in a minute and attacks the intruders with a fury expressed in a Slavonic phrase: equivalent to "savage as a waked winter bear." Badgers leave their burrows a little sooner, being often awakened by a spell of warm weather, a month before the vernal equinox, and after an absolute fast of ten weeks will trot for miles in search of roots and acorns that have perhaps to be scraped out of the half-frozen ground.
The little dormouse, in its winter-sleep of five months, suffers a loss of weight sometimes ex-
drops of water by gnawing the edges of a cleft in the slate-covered roof. His life had thus been saved by the accident of a few heavy rain-showers, but there was no chance for a crumb of food, no grain, leather, rats or mice, no vestige of living things with the exception of a few spiders under the rafters of the roof. The whole summer passed, and a part of autumn; but during the first week of October there was a picnic on the castle mountain, and a wandering party of sight-seers rescued the little prisoner that had been locked up about the middle of June. Its ribs could be counted as easily as in a skeleton, but it was still able to drag itself across the floor and lick the hands of its deliverers. Chossat in his Recherches sur l'Inanition, states that the land tortoise of southern France can starve for a year without betraying a reduction of vital energy, and the Proteus anguinus, or serpent salamander, even for a year and a half, provided that the temperature of its cage be kept above the freezing point.
