NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 103 



" Box cages " are most suitable for fresh caught nightingales ; 

 they should have thin paper pasted over the front. 



TORPIDITY, p. 120. White is continually mentioning torpidity. 

 In this country dormice and hedgehogs become torpid. Here is a 

 portrait of a monkey that in White's time would probably have 

 been said to have laid himself up torpid. This remarkable 

 specimen (see next page) was given to me by my brother-in-law, 

 the Itev. H. Gordon, of Harting, near Petersfield, with the 

 following history : 



" In the year 1868 this skeleton of a monkey was given me 

 by the Kev. H. Mitchell, rector of Bosham, near (Winchester. It 

 had been found at Bosham Mill. The owner of the mill, who has 

 since left, had a monkey that disappeared. A birch tree was 

 cut down upon the premises, and lay for some time in an adja- 

 cent carpenter's shop ; and when a part of the bark was found 

 to be loose it was detached, and the monkey's sarcophagus was 

 revealed, as you have it in the woodcut. It was a great puzzle 

 to me that, while the lower part of the body was so much 

 squeezed up, the head had resisted all pressure from the growth 

 of the tree. I thought at one time that the head had fitted into 

 a decayed cavity of the tree ; but on showing the bark adjacent 

 to the head, some experienced connoisseurs of English timber 

 pronounced it to have been living wood when the tree was 

 felled, and added that the said bark was still green, a proof that 

 the tree had lived within two years of 1868. At a neighbouring 

 dinner party in 1869, the late Bishop of Winchester, Dr. S. 

 Wilberforce, was giving us some jokes about Darwin, and I 

 took the opportunity of introducing this dried monkey. An 

 illustrious mock jury was at once impanelled to try the cause 

 of our Darwinian brother's death. No verdict, however, was 

 returned. The Bishop thought it might be a hoax, but Sir 

 Roderick Murchison pronounced it genuine and remarkable." 



This monkey is a Marmozet ; his length is body, six inches ; 

 tail, seven inches. The poor little creature is quite dried up 

 into a mummy ; the hair on his head and the aspect of the eyes 

 make him look very like a small human baby mummified. 

 The hands rest against the sides of his head as if in pain. I 

 am afraid the poor little fellow must have crawled in and died 

 of starvation. 



It is a very remarkable thing, but there is no mark of his 

 having been touched by any fly or other insect. The body still 

 adheres very tight to the bark ; the lower part of the body is 

 very much crushed, but, as Mr. Mitchell remarks, the head 

 remains intact. The appearance of the bark covering the 



