oes to sleep without thought of the morrow.

How he is maintained for several months without eating is one of
nature's mysteries. Every one has heard the absurd theory: that he does
so by "sucking his paws," and the ingenious Buffon has not only given
credence to this story, but endeavours to support it, by stating that
the paws when cut open yield a substance of a milky nature!

It is a curious fact that this story is to be found scattered all over
the world--wherever bears hybernate. The people of Kamschatka have it;
so also the Indians, and Esquimaux of the Hudson's Bay territory, and
the Norwegian and Lap hunters of Europe. Whence did these
widely-distributed races of men derive this common idea of a habit
which, if the story be a true one, must be common to bears of very
different species?

This question can be answered. In northern Europe the idea first
originated--among the hunters of Scandinavia. But the odd story once
told was too good to be lost; and every traveller, since the first
teller of it, has taken care to embellish his narrative about bears with
this selfsame conceit; so that, like the tale of the Amazon women in
South America, the natives have learnt it from the travellers, and not
the travellers from the natives!

How absurd to suppose that a huge quadruped, whose daily food would be
several pounds weight of animal or vegetable matter--a bear who can
devour the carcass of a calf at a single meal--could possibly subsist
for two months on the _paw-milk_ which Monsieur Buffon has described!

How then can we account for his keeping alive? There need be no
difficulty in doing so. It is quite possible that during this long
sleep the digestive power or process is suspended, or only carried on at
a rate infinitesimally small; that, moreover, life is sustained and the
blood kept in action by means of the large amount of fat which the bear
has collected previous to his _going to bed_. It is certain that, just
at their annual _bed time_, bears are fatter than at any other season of
the year. The ripening of the forest fruits, and the falling of various
seeds of mast-worts, upon which, during the autumn, bears principally
subsist, then supply them with abundance, and nothing hinders them to
get fat and go to sleep upon it. They would have no object in keeping
awake: were they to do so, in those countries where they practise
hybernation, they would certainly starve, for, the ground being then
froz