144 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
feet apart ; they traverse Nordland and Finmark, cross lakes 
and rivers, and gnaw through hay and cornstacks rather than 
go round. They infect the ground, and the cattle perish which 
taste of the grass they have touched ; nothing stops them, 
neither fire, torrents, lakes nor morasses. The greatest rock 
gives them but a slight check ; they go round it, and then 
resume their march directly without the least division. If they 
meet a peasant they persist in their course, and jump as high 
as his knees in defence of their progress. They are so fierce as 
to lay hold of a stick and suffer themselves to be swung about 
Fig. 1. 
group Of lemmings. 
before they quit their hold. If struck they turn about and 
bite, and will make a noise like a dog. Foxes, lynxes, and 
ermines follow them in great numbers, and at length they 
perish, either through want of food or by destroying one 
another, or in some great water, or in the sea. They are the 
dread of the country, and in former times spiritual weapons 
were exerted against them; the priest exorcised them, and had 
a long form of prayer to arrest the evil. Happily it does not 
occur frequently — once or twice only in twenty years* It seems 
like a vast colony of emigrants from a nation overstocked, a 
