32 MK. W. D. CROTCH OTi THE MIGRATION AND 



or four generatious of a brief subarctic summer serve to swell 

 the pilgrim caravan. They winter beneath more than 6 feet of 

 snow during seven or eight weary months ; and with the first days 

 of summer (for in these regions there is no spring) the migra- 

 tion is renewed. At length the harassed crowd, thinned by the 

 unceasing attacks of the wolf, the fox, the dog, and even the 

 reindeer, pursued by eagle, hawk, and owl, and never spared by man 

 himself, yet still a vast multitude, plunges into the Atlantic Ocean 

 on the first calm day, and perishes with its front still pointing 

 westward. No faint heart lingers on the way ; and no survivor re- 

 turns to the mountains. Mr. E.. CoUett, a Norwegian naturalist, 

 writes that in Nov. 1868 (quoted by Lilljeborg infra) a ship sailed 

 for 15 hours through a swarm of Lemmings, which extended as far 

 over the Trondhjemsfiord as the eye could reach. 



In this remarkable migration it is not perhaps the power of 

 direction evinced which is most striking. Domesticated animals, 

 and even men in a savage state, have often distinctly manifested 

 this faculty, which, to whatever it may be owing, is certainly not 

 explicable by any " known sense or power of judgment." 



Herr Palmen*, indeed, says " experience guides migration," and 

 the older migrants guide the younger, like one of Mr. Cook's 

 " personally conducted tours." 'This cannot be true of the lem- 

 mings. I may briefly mention that a young dog which I took 

 from England, and then from my home in Vaage Valley by a path 

 to Heindaken, a distance of forty-six miles, ran back the next 

 morning by a direct route of his own, crossing three rapid rivers 

 and much snow, and accomplishing the distance in less than six 

 hours without the vestige of a path. This same dog afterwards 

 repeated the feat, but followed the path, and took two days in 

 reaching his destination, hindered and not aided, as I believe, by 

 his experience. But to return to the lemmings — it seems almost 

 impossible that a so-called instinct, even if this could be shown to be 

 independent of inherited experimental experience, would so totally 

 and persistently fail in its only rational purpose. If insufiiciency 

 of food be alleged as the present cause of these migrations, the ques- 

 tion at once arises, why do not settlers make a permanent home 

 in the many oases through which they pass ? Why, in fact, do they 

 migrate westward and not southward '? and why do they not re- 

 turn ? The Swallows and all our familiar migratory birds seek 



* Om Fogiai'ues flyttningsvagr (Helsingfors, 1874), an abstract of whose 

 Tiews is given bj Prof. Newton, o^'- '^^^- 



