organic life continues, we breathe much more slowly and at longer intervals.  However, there is this important difference (generally speaking) between an animal and a steam-engine.  You can let the engine run short of coals and come to a dead standstill, without impairing its future possibilities of similar motion; you have only to get fresh coals, after weeks or months of inaction, and light up a fresh fire, when your engine will immediately begin to work again, exactly the same as before.  But if an animal organism once fairly runs down, either from want of food or any other cause—­in short, if it dies—­it very seldom comes to life again.

I say ‘very seldom’ on purpose, because there are a few cases among the extreme lower animals where a water-haunting creature can be taken out of the water and can be thoroughly dried and desiccated, or even kept for an apparently unlimited period wrapped up in paper or on the slide of a microscope; and yet, the moment a drop of water is placed on top of it, it begins to move and live again exactly as before.  This sort of thorough-going suspended animation is the kind we ought to expect from any well-constituted and proper-minded toad-in-a-hole.  Whether anything like it ever really occurs in the higher ranks of animal life, however, is a different question; but there can be no doubt that to some slight extent a body to all intents and purposes quite dead (physically speaking) by long immersion in water—­a drowned man, for example—­may really be resuscitated by heat and stimulants, applied immediately, provided no part of the working organism has been seriously injured or decomposed.  Such people may be said to be pro tem. functionally, though not structurally, dead.  The heart has practically ceased to beat, the lungs have ceased to breathe, and physical life in the body is temporarily extinct.  The fire, in short, has gone out.  But if only it can be lighted again before any serious change in the system takes place, all may still go on precisely as of old.

Many animals, however, find it convenient to assume a state of less complete suspended animation during certain special periods of the year, according to the circumstances of their peculiar climate and mode of life.  Among the very highest animals, the most familiar example of this sort of semi-torpidity is to be found among the bears and the dormice.  The common European brown bear is a carnivore by descent, who has become a vegetarian in practice, though whether from conscientious scruples or mere practical considerations of expediency, does not appear.  He feeds chiefly on roots, berries, fruits, vegetables, and honey, all of which he finds it comparatively difficult to procure during winter weather.  Accordingly, as everyone knows, he eats immoderately in the summer season, till he has grown fat enough to supply bear’s grease to all Christendom.  Then he hunts himself out a hollow tree or rock-shelter, curls himself up quietly to sleep, and snores away the whole livelong