Page:Aspects of nature in different lands and different climates; with scientific elucidations (IA b29329668 0002).pdf/57

 *[Footnote: has been introduced into the Isle of France, 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 temperature of the coldest month is 3° Reaumur (6°.75 Fah.) 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 seeking 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 suddenly 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]*