30 The Field Naturalist's Quarterly Feb. 



torpid brethren at his leisure, found these lazy gastronomic 

 delights enough to counterbalance the imminent danger of 

 death which came with this new capacity. 



Insects are a familiar group in which the stress of winter 

 is tided over in the majority of cases by the assumption of 

 a stage in their metamorphosis which is one of comparative 

 rest, and which may conveniently persist as such, or become 

 active to its completion with foul or fair conditions of 

 weather. But snails are not well situated in this respect : 

 their adult life is longer, and may commonly extend over 

 several years, while, except in the Q,gg (and here but imper- 

 fectly), there is no period of development in which the 

 animal is well protected from external conditions, and 

 which may be almost indefinitely prolonged under un- 

 favourable circumstances. On the other hand, of course, 

 the adults are capable of taking on a stage of comparative 

 rest more readily than many other invertebrates. How 

 far any species of snails pass the winter in the Q,gg stage 

 cannot, in the present state of our knowledge, be pro- 

 perly estimated. I have on many occasions been struck 

 by the frequency with which one finds three common 

 species {Tachea and Limncea peregra) pairing in the second 

 half of September and the first half of October. When the 

 eggs are thereafter deposited I have not been able to find 

 out. I have no certain recollection of finding eggs of L. 

 peregra (the common spired pond snail) as late as the 

 middle of October. It is possible that in these and other 

 species the winter is passed in the egg. 



All individuals of a species of snail do not exhibit the 

 same reaction towards cold weather. In many species the 

 young do not hibernate to nearly the same extent as the 

 adults. A very marked example of this is found in C. 

 aspersits. Why this should be so it is impossible to say ; 

 owing to their smaller size the young actually have a 

 relatively larger surface to be exposed to the cold than the 

 full-grown animal, and the area of the aperture is not 

 relatively smaller. Perhaps, after all, the temerity of youth 

 and its immunity from many ills of the flesh must pass for 

 an explanation here, as in the precisely similar phenomenon 

 exhibited in ourselves. Observation certainly leads one to 



