[Illustration: TADPOLES AND YOUNG FROG.]

HOW ANIMALS SPEND THE WINTER

(FROM GLEANINGS FROM NATURE.)[2]

BY W. S. BLATCHLEY.

[2] "Popular Science Monthly," February, 1897. Copyright by William
Stanley Blatchley, 1899.

[Illustration: A COCOON.]

One of the greatest problems which each of the living forms about us
has had to solve, during the years of its existence on earth, is how
best to perpetuate its kind during that cold season which once each
year, in our temperate zone, is bound to come. Many are the solutions
to this problem. Each form of life has, as it were, solved it best to
suit its own peculiar case, and to the earnest student of Nature there
is nothing more interesting than to pry into these solutions and note
how varied, strange, and wonderful they are.

To fully appreciate some of the facts mentioned below it must be borne
in mind that there is no such thing as "spontaneous generation" of
life. Every cell is the offspring of a pre-existing cell. Nothing but
a living thing can produce a living thing. Hence every weed that next
season will spring up and provoke the farmer's ire, and every insect
which will then make life almost intolerable for man or beast, exists
throughout the winter in some form....

Beginning with the earth-worms and their kindred, we find that at the
approach of winter they burrow deep down where the icy breath of the
frost never reaches, and there they live, during the cold season, a
life of comparative quiet. That they are exceedingly sensitive to
warmth, however, may be proven by the fact that when a warm rain comes
some night in February or March, thawing out the crust of the earth,
the next morning reveals in our dooryards the mouths of hundreds of
the pits or burrows of these primitive tillers of the soil, each
surrounded by a little pile of pellets, the castings of the active
artisans of the pits during the night before.

If we will get up before dawn on such a morning we can find the worms
crawling actively about over the surface of the ground, but when the
first signs of day appear they seek once more their protective
burrows, and only an occasional belated individual serves as a
breakfast for the early birds.

The eyes of these lowly creatures are not visible, and consist of
single special cells scattered among the epidermal cells of the skin,
and connected by means of a sensory nerve fibre with a little bunch of
nervous matter in the body. Such a sim