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Updated: May 21, 2025
You know most of the birds migrate to the Sunny South every autumn and back every spring. "Once in a while it happens that food becomes very scarce where the Lemmings are. Then very many of them get together, just as migrating birds form great flocks, and start on a long journey in search of a place where there is plenty of food. They form a great army and push ahead, regardless of everything.
It may be added that there is scarce one of these species of which there are not two or more varieties, known only to those who have made a study of the Kingdom of Nature. In this group we include not only Rats, but a great many other small rodents, or gnawers, such as Mice, Marmots, Lemmings, Hamsters, Mole-Rats, Jerboas, and Jumping Mice.
Concerning the Mice and Lemmings, I have not complete data, but they are believed to multiply and suffer in the same, way. Third. The purely carnivorous, whose existence is dependent on the Rabbits. This includes chiefly the Lynx and Fox, but in less degree all the small carnivores.
In most years you may wander about the country for weeks and never see a lemming, but occasionally there comes what is called a "lemming-year," when more young lemmings are born than usual, and then the trouble begins. They eat up everything round about their homes, and they begin to wander in search of food in packs of thousands, like swarms of locusts.
And like these Norway lemmings had rushed into the Thames at Tilbury, men, women, and children, and been drowned, I should say, 'I am very pleased to hear it. For to my mind these people are no more worthy of being saved than a migrating horde of Norway rats, or than the Gadarene swine that ran down the steep and were drowned in the sea."
Such a striking natural phenomenon as a storm, a disease, a waterfall, are recognised as "animate"; while fruits and herbs, and even inconspicuous animals, such as house-flies, maggots, lemmings, sheep, are not ordinarily apprehended as "animate" except when taken collectively. As here used the term does not necessarily imply an indwelling soul or spirit.
Ship captains report sailing for hours through waters literally alive with them. This suicidal act of the lemmings strikes one as a kind of insanity. It is one of the most puzzling phenomena I know of in animal life. But the migration of all animals on a large scale shows the same unity of purpose. The whole tribe shares in a single impulse.
If some person were to come to me to-morrow to say that all the East-enders, from Bishopsgate Street to Bow, had been seized with a kind of frenzy, like that which from time to time takes possession of the Norway marmots, or bandicoots, or whatever they are called " "Lemmings," said Constance. "Yes, lemmings. Thanks, Connie, you are a perfect walking encyclopaedia.
But the funds of the society are by no means sufficient for the work before it, though many of its teachers are unpaid, seeking no reward upon earth. I remained in the Zoological Gardens for a few weeks, improving my acquaintance with the mild Zibethicus and the gentle Lemmings.
"Way up in the Far North are two of Danny's cousins more closely related to him than to any other members of the Mouse family. Yet, strange to say, they are not called Mice at all, but Lemmings. However, they belong to the Mouse family. "Bandy the Banded Lemming is the most interesting, because he is the one member of the entire family who changes the color of his coat.
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