THE LEMMING. 119 



most dauntless courage, standing on the defensive against both men and animals, and biting very 

 sharply at anything that comes within its reach. From time to time, from some unexplained 

 cause, the Lemmings start in vast swarms from their mountain fastnesses, and make their way 

 in a straight line in some definite direction. Nothing seems to turn them from their course ; 

 they go straight on, over hill and dale, and, although said at other times to have an aversion to 

 water, they now swim across any lakes or rivers that come in their way. In this operation 

 many of them lose their lives, for they require smooth water for their navigation, and the least 

 breeze ruffling the surface suffices to send hundreds of them to the bottom. In this way they 

 gradually arrive at the cultivated regions, where they do so much damage to vegetation, that 

 in olden times a special form of prayer and exorcism was in use against them. Their march is 



accompanied by great numbers of carnivorous beasts and birds of all sorts. Wolves, Foxes, and Wild 

 Cats, and the smaller quadrupeds of the family Mustelida?, Eagles, Hawks, and Owls, all prey upon 

 them with avidity even the Reindeer is said to stamp them to death ; and the story of his eating 

 them, long discredited, has been confirmed on good authority, while man, with his Dogs and Cats, is 

 not behindhand in the work of destruction. Nevertheless, a great multitude survives all these 

 dangers, and, strange to say, the termination of this painful migration is always the sea, into 

 which the survivors of the march plunge, and, apparently, voluntarily commit suicide. Mr. Crotch, 

 who has published several papers on the Lemming and its migrations, says that in Norway 

 these animals always proceed from the central backbone of the country in an east or -west direc- 

 tion, and that in either case the survivors of the march drown themselves, those that go westward 

 in the Atlantic, those that go eastward in the Gulf of Bothnia. His notion is that the migration 

 is in obedience to an inherited instinct acquired at a time when there was land where the sea now 

 rolls ; but there are many difficulties in the way of such a hypothesis. 



Besides the Scandinavian Lemming above noticed, several other species occur in the northern 

 parts of the world. Three species (Myodes lagurus, obcnsis, and torquatus) inhabit Siberia ; the latter 



