132 SECRETS OF ANIMAL LIFE 
must not go farther; our point is merely to suggest 
an interesting inquiry into the great variety of 
ways in which different animals solve the same 
problem of surviving the winter. For those that 
have no solution to offer, and for those that fumble 
with their solution, winter spells sooner or later 
elimination. 
Aswe come home we pass a little tarn, which was 
such a merry, busy place at midsummer, but is now 
half-frozen, and looks as lifeless as the moor. The 
water round the edges is clear and clean, but peering 
down we cannot see the slightest stir of lite. Now 
the biochemists of the ponds have told us a very 
interesting thing: that the dying away in autumn 
and winter produces substances (“auxetics’’) 
which later on promote the multiplication of cells 
and towards spring an increasing quantity of certain 
other substances (‘‘augmentors”) which give more 
power to the elbow of the first. And so out of death 
come the stimulants of the wonderful awakening 
of pond-life in spring. There is, no doubt, in that 
tarn an abundance of life even now, but it is in 
hiding, it is in winter-retreat, it is waiting. And as 
we look at the partial covering of ice another thought 
rises in our mind which lasts us all the way home: 
the thought that this world, in spite of all Man’s 
cataclysms, is singularly well adapted for going on. 
For there is surely food for reflection in the fact 
that fresh water is anomalous in expanding, not 
contracting, when it is near its freezing-point. This 
brings the coldest water to the top, thus tending to 
