Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/422

406 Nordland and Finmark, cross lakes and rivers, and gnaw through hay and corn stacks 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 defense of their progress. They are so fierce as to lay hold of a stick and suffer themselves to be swung about 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 discharge of animals from the northern hive which once poured forth its myriads of human beings upon Southern Europe. They do not form any magazine for winter provision, by which improvidence, it seems, they are compelled to make their summer migration in certain years, urged by hunger. They are not poisonous, as vulgarly reported, for they are often eaten by the Laplanders, who compare their flesh to that of squirrels."

M. Guyon disposes of the theory that these migrations are influenced by approaching, severe weather, since the one witnessed by himself took place in the spring; also the superabundance of food during the previous autumn precluded all idea of starvation. He therefore adopts a third view, that excessive multiplication in certain years necessitates emigration, and that this follows a descending course, like the mountain-streams, till at length the ocean is reached. Mr. R. Collett, a Norwegian naturalist, writes that in November, 1868, a ship sailed for fifteen hours through a swarm of lemmings, which extended as far over the Trondhjems-fjord as the eye could reach.

I will now relate my own experience of the lemming during three migrations in Norway, and in a state of captivity in England. The situation of Heimdalen, where I reside during the summer months, is peculiarly well suited for observation of their migrations, lying as it does at an elevation of 3,000 feet, and immediately under the highest mountains in Scandinavia; and yet, excepting during migration, I have never seen or been able to procure a specimen. It was in the autumn of 1867 that I first heard the peculiar cry of the lemming, guided by which I soon found the pretty animal backed up by a stone, against which it incessantly jerked its body in passionate leaps of rage, all the while uttering a shrill note of defiance. The black,