A DETAIL OF HIBERNATION.
In the observation of animals no detail is harder to test than the -date at which this creature or that retires into winter. quarters. You may-consult a score of text-books.and find in none any news of the hour at which the dormouse or toad retires into its hibernaculum.- Yet now and again accident gives us rough clues. For example : during the gale, of November 16th last a large may tree in my garden was blown over into the stream. The trunk was not broken off completely, but lay prone in the water, gaping with wide spaces between the stretched layers of fibre. This week I completed the severance and pulled the trunk on to dry ground. Within the fissures, which were not in existence before the gale were two hibernating frogs (and, incidentally, a number of young fresh water crayfish, which however have nothing to do with the.case). It follows that the frogs did not hibernate before November 16th, and it is probable that they did not retire much later. The autumn was perhaps unusually mild ;. and the date of hibernation was abnormally late, doubtless for. that reason.
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