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The columbine was once known as Herba leonis, from a belief that it was the lion's favourite plant, and it is said that when bears were half-starved by hybernating having remained for days without food they were suddenly restored by eating the arum.
The annual return to the hybernating den is then a fixed unalterable instinct, like the autumnal migration of some birds to a warmer latitude.
It occurred to me that land-shells, when hybernating and having a membranous diaphragm over the mouth of the shell, might be floated in chinks of drifted timber across moderately wide arms of the sea.
For just then great alterations were being made to render it habitable: new rooms were being added on to the old building, wooden flooring laid over the old bricks and tiles, and the half-rotten thatch, a haunt of rats and the home of centipedes and of many other hybernating creeping things, was being stripped off to be replaced by a clean healthy wooden roof.
What the man said was literally true. The bear had gone into this cleft or cave to take his winter nap, and during the long weeks, while he was thus hybernating, the water, of rain and melting snow, dripping from the top of the cliff, had formed enormous stalactites of ice, with stalagmites as well: since it was one of the latter that had closed up the entrance to the den, and fairly shut him up in his own house!
The huanaco has never been a hybernating animal; but we must assume that, like the crotalus of the north, he had formed a habit of congregating with his fellows at certain seasons at the same spot; further, that these were seasons of suffering to the animal the suffering, or discomfort and danger, having in the first place given rise to the habit.
Then she issues from her prolonged imprisonment, only the shadow of her former self, and scarce able to keep her feet. The Northern Indians and Eskimos capture hundreds of these hybernating bears every season taking both them and their cubs at the same time.
But a steady-going England, on whose John Bull qualities of reticence and solidity we have been prone to pride ourselves, does occasionally betray a quicker and more curious spirit than it commonly desires to be credited with, and there is no pole to stir it from its hybernating sleep which reaches so far and punches the fat ribs so soundly as the pole of scandal.
I could not rest or think, as I wanted to think, till night and morning had again two or three times tossed me about as a society ball. I think one's mind gets to be something like a ball too, when one lives such a life; all one's better thoughts rolled up, like a hybernating hedgehog, and put away as not wanted for use. I had no opportunity to unroll mine for several days.
But we have seen that at Bahia Blanca, which is four degrees southward, and therefore with a climate only a very little colder, this same temperature, with a rather less extreme heat, was sufficient to awake all orders of animated beings. This shows how nicely the stimulus required to arouse hybernating animals is governed by the usual climate of the district, and not by the absolute heat.
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