WAKING AND SLEEPING 11 



One year when the frost came late in March, it 

 must have caught the newts after their return to the 

 ponds in anticipation of summer. As we skated 

 over the clear ice of a certain brick-field we saw 

 the orange belly of a newt that had got frozen tight 

 in the under surface, and, marking it, were able to 

 secure a cake of the ice with the newt frozen fast 

 in it. The creature seemed as brittle as its aspic, 

 and I believe that if we had tried to bend it it 

 would have snapped almost as readily. Yet when 

 the ice came undone in an aquarium, the newt 

 came to life and swam about as though his ex- 

 perience had been one of the usual incidents of his 

 career. 



Newts are often gregarious in their hibernaculum. 

 In the head of an oak that had been for years an 

 ornament and a perch for aubrietia in the centre 

 of a flower-bed, we found one winter over thirty 

 smooth newts lying up together. There are two 

 small ponds near, one twenty yards away, the 

 other more than fifty, and both with a good deal 

 of difficult country between them and the stump. 

 It seemed a wonderful thing that all those newts 

 had managed on leaving the water in autumn to 

 reach their favoured winter bedroom. Who has 

 ever been encouraged to form a high opinion of the 

 family instincts of newts ? Yet it seems as though 

 some wise amphibian of ten years ago must have 

 brought his children here to sleep, that they 

 brought their offspring, and so from generation to 

 generation the leader who knew the way raised 



