Capitolo 74
goes to footstep of snail, while waking up himself/herself/itself to the touch of the family damp, puts his/her head
cautiously out of his/her hull, it walked above to the top of the basin, and
started to take a superficial examination of British institutions with the his/her four
tentacles eye-that hands. So strange a recovery from an along torpid
conditions, only equalled from that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,
deserved an unusual amount of scientific recognition. The desert
immediately goes to footstep of snail it woke up and it was found famous. No, indeed he sat for
his/her portrait to a zoological and eminent artist, the Mr. Waterhouse; and a
woodcutting from I squirt him/it so gotten, with a history of his/her life and
adventures, can be found equal to this day in the Dr. Woodward 'the Manual of
the Mollusca', to testify if I lie.
I mention this curious example before, because it is the best
case authenticated on record (till now as my knowledge it goes) of some animal
existing in a state of the suspended animation for some long period of time
together. But there are the other cases of encysted or animals of immured
what, although less striking as you greet the length of time during that
numbness has been observed, it is more from near very analogous to the truth
or the mythical conditions of the I toad-in-a-puncture. That African Of the west and curious
mud-fish, the Lepidosiren (family to all the readers of evolutionary
the literature like one of the existing and more unusual connections among fish and
amphibians), the lives between the a little deep swimming pools and broads of the Gambia,
what they have dried above during the greatest part in the tropical summer. To
provides against this annual contingency, the mud-fish retires in the
soft clay to the fund of the swimming pools, where a kind is formed of
makes the nest, and there it hibernates, or rather it spends the summer in lethargy, for months together, in
a torpid condition. Surrounding mud hardens then in a dry ball;
and these balls are dug out some ground of the I rice-live from the
natives, with the fish in them from what it intends many champions of