224 ADAPTATION OF MAMMALS 



time a family of young armadillos under my observation : 

 queer little creatures almost exactly like the mother. But 

 what impressed me most was the absolute indifference of 

 the parent to the young. If I took a little one away and 

 placed it in the middle of the room, the mother after a 

 while, in her nervous wandering, would run over it, but 

 apparently not recognize it. How striking is the contrast 

 to a cat and her kittens, or a cow and her calf, where the 

 mother is solicitous and watchful, often guarding her 

 young with her life ! 



In certain low mammals, as the duck mole, the young is 

 hatched from an Qgg and the minute creature reared in a 

 nest in a tunnel. The young of the kangaroo is hardly an 

 inch in length at birth, and nature provides a pouch in the 

 mother in which the minute animal is placed and kept until 

 it is large enough to care for itself. The mother bat, even 

 the flying fox, carries her young about with her in the air. 

 The opossum is provided with a prehensile tail, and the 

 mother is seen walking about, her back covered with young, 

 their little tails twined about that of the parent. The young 

 whale is born and suckled in quiet bays at first, as the Gulf 

 of California, where the California gray whale makes a sav- 

 age onslaught on boats that approach the young, and many 

 men have been killed here — victims to the rage of the 

 mother. The hippopotamus holds its big young on its 

 back when in the water. Many mammals build nests in 

 trees, as the wood rat, which also builds on the ground or 

 in it. Nature endows many animals with the faculty of 

 bridging over the foodless season in long periods of sleep. 

 Thus in the North the bears enter a winter sleep. At 

 that time they are very fat, but the snow buries the roots. 



