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Show ANNOTATIO SAND ADDITIONS. 257 unspoilt dough. May not the newly discovered monad (Monas prodigiosa), which causes blood-like spots on mealy substances, have been mingled with this fungus? Ehrenberg, in his great work on Infusoria (s. 492-496), has given the most complete history of all the investigations which have taken place on what is called the revivification of Rotiferre. He believes that, in pite of all the means of desiccation employed, the organization-fluid still remains in the apparently dead animal. He contests the hypothesis of "latent life;" death, he says, is not "life latent, but the want of life." We have evidence of the diminution, if not of the entire disappearance or suspension of organic functions, in the hybernation or winter-sleep both of warm and cold-blooded animals, in the dormice, marmots, sand martins (Hirundo riparia) according to Cuvier (Regne animal, 1829, t. i. p. 396), frogs and toads. Frogs, awakened from winter-sleep by warmth, can support an eight times' longer stay under water without being drowned, than frogs in the breeding season. It would seem as if the functions of the lungs in respiration, for some time after their excitability had been suspended, required a less degree of activity. The circumstance of the sand-martin sometimes burying itself in a morass is a phenomenon which, while it seems not to admit of doubt, is the more surprising, as in birds respiration is so extremely energetic, that, according to Lavoisier's experiments, two small sparrows, in their ordinary state, decomposed, in the same space of time, as much atmospheric air as a porpoise. (Lavoisier, Memoires de Chimie, t. i. p. 119.) The wintersleep of the swaUow in question (the Hirundo riparia) is not supposed to belong to the entire species, but only to have been observed in some individuals. (Milne Edwards, Elemens de Zoologie, 1834, p. 543.) As in the cold zone, the deprivation of heat causes some animals to fall into winter-sleep, so the hot, tropical countries afford an analogous phenomenon, which has not been sufficiently attended to, and to which I have applied the name of summer-sleep. (Relation historique, t. ii. pp. 192 and 626.) Drought and continuous high temperatures act like the cold of winter in diminishing excitability. In Madagascar (which, with the exception of a very small portion at 22* |
