4o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



erse Nordland and Finmark, cross lakes and rivers, and gnaw through 

 hay and corn stacks rather than go round. They infect the ground, and 

 the cattle perish which taste of the grass they have touched ; nothing 

 stops them neither fire, torrents, lakes, nor morasses. The greatest 

 rock gives them but a slight check ; they go round it, and then 

 resume their march directly without the least division. If they meet 

 a peasant they persist in their course, and jump as high as his knees 

 in defense of their progress. They are so fierce as to lay hold of a 

 stick and sufi"er themselves to be swung about before they quit their 

 hold. If struck they turn about and bite, and will make a noise like 

 a dog. Foxes, lynxes, and ermines, follow them in great numbers, 

 and at length they perish, either through want of food or by destroy- 

 ing one another, or in some great water, or in the sea. They are the 

 dread of the country, and in former times spiritual weapons were ex- 

 erted against them ; the priest exorcised them, and had a long foim 

 of prayer to arrest the evil. Happily it does not occur frequently 

 once or twice only in twenty years. It seems like a vast colony 

 of emigrants from a nation overstocked, a discharge of animals from 

 the northern hive which once poured forth its myriads of human 

 beings upon Southern Europe. They do not form any magazine for 

 winter provision, by which improvidence, it seems, they are compelled 

 to make their summer migration in certain years, urged by hunger. 

 They are not poisonous, as vulgarly reported, for they are often eaten 

 by the Laplanders, who compare their flesh to that of squirrels." 



M. Guyon disposes of the theory that these migrations are influ- 

 enced by approaching, severe weather, since the one witnessed by 

 himself took place in the spring; also the superabundance of food 

 during the previous autumn precluded all idea of starvation. He 

 therefore adopts a third view, that excessive multiplication in certain 

 years necessitates emigration, and that this follows a descending 

 course, like the mountain-streams, till at length the ocean is reached. 

 Mr. R. Collett, a Norwegian naturalist, writes that in November, 

 1868, a ship sailed for fifteen hours through a swarm of lemmings, 

 which extended as far over the Trondhjems-fjord as the eye could 

 reach. 



I will now relate my own experience of the lemming during three 

 migrations in Norway, and in a state of captivity in England. The 

 situation of Heimdalen, where I reside during the summer months, is 

 peculiarly well suited for observation of their migrations, lying as it 

 does at an elevation of 3,000 feet, and immediately imder the highest 

 mountains in Scandinavia; and yet, excepting during migration, I 

 have never seen or been able to procure a specimen. It was in the 

 autumn of 1867 that I first heard the peculiar cry of the lemming, 

 guided by which I soon found the pretty animal backed up by a stone, 

 against which it incessantly jerked its body in passionate leaps of 

 rage, all the while uttering a shrill note of defiance. Tlie black, bead- 



