ARCTIC RODENTS. 561 



and multiply ad infinitum, incessantly renewing centres of sup- 

 puration." 



To the natives of North America, says a zoologist, the reindeer is 

 only known as a beast of chase, but he is a most important one. 

 There is hardly a part of the animal which is not made available to 

 some useful purpose. Clothing made of the skin is, according to Sir 

 J. Richardson, so impervious to the cold, that, with the addition of a 

 blanket of the same material, any one so clothed may bivouac on the 

 snow with safety in the most intense cold of an Arctic winter's night. 

 The venison, when in high condition, has several inches of fat on the 

 haunches, and said to equal that of the fallow-deer in our best 

 English parks : the tongue and some of the tripe are reckoned most 

 delicious morsels. Pemmican is formed by pouring one-third part of 

 melted fat over the pounded meat, and incorporating them well together. 

 The Eskimos and Greenlanders consider the stomach or paunch, with 

 its contents, a great delicacy ; and Captain Sir James Ross says that 

 these contents form the only vegetable food which the natives of 

 Boothia ever taste.* 



The order of Rodents has no other representatives in the Arctic 

 Deserts than the Arctic Hare and the Alpine Lagomys. The former 

 is a little larger than our European hare. His abundant fur, 

 gray in summer, grows white in winter, and affords him protection, 

 by a merciful provision of nature, against the carnivorous beasts of 

 prey. It becomes impossible to discern him from the snowy mantle 

 which covers all the earth. He is a native of Labrador and Green- 

 land. 



The Lagomys are small animals, scarcely exceeding the Guinea- 

 pig in size, and measuring only nine inches in length. His long 

 head is ornamented with a pair of short, broad, and rounded ears. 

 He inhabits the Altai Mountains, but extends even into Kamtschatka, 

 seeking an asylum in the wooded tracts among the mossy rocks and 

 flashing waterfalls, lodging in the fissures or burrowing in the most 

 * Sir J. Richardson, " Fauna Boreal! Americana." 



3G 



