/APUS iirnsoxirs. 293 



this animal brings forth its young. But it has been seen leaping 

 about with the young ones strongly attached to its teats. Four 

 young ones have been seen thus attached." 



Dr. DeKay says that Mr. Jesse Booth, of Orange County, X<-\v 

 York, writes him : "In cross-plowing some years since, my atten- 

 tion was taken up by seeing some small thing move off from near 

 my plough, at about the moderate walk of a man. It went over 

 ridges and descended the hollows of the furrows, bearing some re- 

 semblance to an old withered oak leaf. I pursued it, when it 

 proved to be one of these wood-mice, or jumping mice ; a female, 

 with four young ones attached by their mouths to its teats." 



The Hibernation of the Jumping Mouse. 



Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton, of Philadelphia, was the first to 

 make known the fact that the Jumping- Mouse hibernates. On 

 the 2d of October, 1795, he read a paper before the American 

 Philosophical Society (which was not published, however, till i 799) 

 in which he states : "In the month of February, one of these 

 animals was found, seemingly in a torpid-state, under a stone, in 

 opening a quarry." He further says, that a farmer, living near 

 Philadelphia, has often discovered them, " at the depth of eighteen 

 inches or two feet under ground, when he has been digging for the 

 roots of horse-radish and parsley, in the winter-time." f In a 

 supplement to this article, published in 1804, the same author 

 observes : 



" In the month of August, 1796, one of these little animals was 

 brought to me from the vicinity of this city. It was put into a 

 large glass jar, where I was so fortunate as to preserve it for near 

 four months. Though it made many efforts to escape from its 



* Zoology of New York, Part I, 1842, p. 72. 



f Some account of an American Species of Dipus, or Jerboa. By Benjamin Smith Barton, M. D. 

 Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. IV, No. XII, 1799, p. 122. Barton 

 again refers to the hibernation of this species in his Fragments of the Natural History of Pennsyl- 

 vania, 1799, pp- xii, xiii. 



