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Do you not know that, however you may gloss over the thing, or forget it amidst a whirl of engagements and occupations, or try to divert your thoughts into more or less noble or ignoble channels of pleasures and pursuits, there does lie, in each of our hearts, the sense, dormant often, but sometimes like a snake in its hybernation, waking up enough to move, and sometimes enough to sting there does lie, in each of us, the consciousness that we are wrong with God, and need something to put us right?
Railway communication and sledge-driving may, by doubling their activity, afford employment to some of the men and beasts who would otherwise be doomed to passive and torpid hybernation. But much of the work that is practicable in other countries almost throughout the year nearly all that is done in the open air suffers here grievous interruption.
Young shoots, and leaves of spring, wild tubers which it scratches from the ground, detected by its keen sense of smell, together with snails, beetles, worms, and everything that creeps upon the earth, now form the bill of fare, until the summer brings forth the welcome fruits that reproduce the condition which the bear had lost through hybernation.
Although these results are too few to enable us to determine the laws with respect to the influence of temperature on insects, they may serve a purpose, in shewing that the effect is not that gradual one of hybernation, where activity and torpor succeed each other but slowly.
It is impossible to unravel many of the mysteries of Nature, and the cause which prompts the instinct of a winter's sleep will always remain doubtful. I should myself attribute hybernation to the necessity of repose at a period when food was impossible to procure.
Excessive heat in the tropics produces an effect upon animals and vegetables analogous to that of excessive cold in northern regions, and hence it is reasonable to suppose that the torpor induced by the one may be but the counterpart of the hybernation which results from the other.
If the fat bear could see itself previous to hybernation in November, and again be introduced to its own photograph upon awakening from its sleep in March, it would be prepared to swear against its own identity. It arises from its winter's nap in wretched condition, having lived entirely upon capital instead of income.
The failure to find the river, or tidings of it, and the possibility of its existence seeming to be forbid by the structure of the country, and hybernation in the inhospitable desert being impossible, and the question being that of life and death, some new plan of conduct became indispensable.
It seems strange that Gilbert White, so accurate an observer of birds, should actually have toyed with this curious belief, though he leant rather to the more reasonable version of occasional hybernation in caves or other sheltered hiding-places.
Each law of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets.
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