58 DARWINISM AND THE PROBLEMS OF LIFE 



temperature some 45 degrees (Fahrenheit), and causing 

 them to breathe ninety times less than usual. With 

 this diminished vital activity it is superfluous to take 

 food. 



The winter-sleep is not always absolute. Thus the 

 dormouse or "seven-sleeper" (Myoxus glis), which has 

 so appropriate a name since its slumbers last for seven 

 months, awakens from time to time, and dreamily con- 

 sumes some of its store of provisions. Others, such as 

 the hamster, awake in their dwellings as soon as the 

 ground thaws, but do not open the stopped holes ; they 

 eat the corn which the hamster especially stores up so 

 abundantly in its home, that the hamster-catchers of 

 Thuringia find their chief profit in the grains, which they 

 clean, dry, and sell as ordinary wheat. Provision-stores 

 are accumulated by almost all hibernating animals, and 

 even by some animals that do not really hibernate. The 

 squirrel stores its food in the clefts of trees, in bushes, 

 and in holes that it digs, and looks it up in winter. 

 Nevertheless, a severe winter kills large numbers of 

 them. Some of their stores are forgotten, others inac- 

 cessible on account of the snow ; and the enfeebled 

 animals quickly succumb to their great enemy, the marten, 

 from which they could save themselves in summer by 

 their speed, and especially by leaping from the highest 

 point of the tree, a feat that their pursuer cannot imitate. 



For other animals the winter is the time of plenty. 

 It was noticed long ago that heaps of earth-worms 

 were stored up in the passages of moles, especially 

 during severe winters ; they were not dead, but 

 stupefied in such a way that they could not crawl 



