ANNOTATIONS AND ADDITIONS. 49 



has been introduced into the Isle of Prance, sleep during 

 great heat. Desjardins makes, it is true, the objection that 

 the time of their slumber is the winter season of the southern 

 hemisphere ; but in a country in which the mean tempera- 

 ture of the coldest month is 3 Reaumur (6. 7 5 Fall.) above 

 that of the hottest month in Paris, this circumstance cannot 

 change the three months' " summer-sleep" of the Tenrec in 

 Madagascar and at Port Louis, into what we understand by 

 a winter-sleep, or state of hybernation. 



In the hot and dry season, the crocodile in the Llanos of 

 Venezuela, the land and water tortoises of the Orinoco, the 

 huge boa, and several smaller kinds of serpents, become 

 torpid and motionless, and lie incrusted in the indurated 

 soil. The missionary Gili relates that the natives, in seek- 

 ing for the slumbering Terekai (land tortoises), which they 

 find lying at a depth of sixteen or seventeen inches in dried 

 mud, are sometimes bitten by serpents which become sud- 

 denly aroused, and which had buried themselves at the same 

 time as the tortoise. An excellent observer, Dr. Peters, 

 who has just returned from the East Coast of Africa, writes 

 thus to me on the subject : " During my short stay at 

 Madagascar I could obtain no certain information respecting 

 the Tenrec ; but, on the other hand, I know that in the 

 East of Africa, where I lived for several years, different 

 kinds of tortoises (Pentonyx and Trionchydias) pass months 

 during the dry season of this tropical country inclosed in the 

 dry hard earth, and without food. The Lepidosiren also, 

 in places where the swamps are dried up, remains coiled up 



VOL. II. 



