’In June 1850, a living pond mussel, which had been more than a year out of water, was sent to Mr. Gray, from Australia.  The big pond snails of the tropics have been found alive in logs of mahogany imported from Honduras; and M. Caillaud carried some from Egypt to Paris, packed in sawdust.  Indeed, it isn’t easy to ascertain the limit of their endurance; for Mr. Laidlay, having placed a number in a drawer for this very purpose, found them alive after five years’ torpidity, although in the warm climate of Calcutta.  The pretty snails called cyclostomas, which have a lid to their shells, are well known to survive imprisonments of many months; but in the ordinary open-mouthed land-snails such cases are even more remarkable.  Several of the enormous tropical snails often used to decorate cottage mantelpieces, brought by Lieutenant Greaves from Valparaiso, revived after being packed, some for thirteen, others for twenty months.  In 1849, Mr. Pickering received from Mr. Wollaston a basketful of Madeira snails (of twenty or thirty different kinds), three-fourths of which proved to be alive, after several months’ confinement, including a sea voyage.  Mr. Wollaston has himself recorded the fact that specimens of two Madeira snails survived a fast and imprisonment in pill-boxes of two years and a half duration, and that large numbers of a small species, brought to England at the same time, were all living after being inclosed in a dry bag for a year and a half.’

Whether the snails themselves liked their long deprivation of food and moisture we are not informed; their personal tastes and inclinations were very little consulted in the matter; but as they and their ancestors for many generations must have been accustomed to similar long fasts during tropical droughts, in all likelihood they did not much mind it.

The real question, then, about the historical toad-in-a-hole narrows itself down in the end merely to this—­how long is it credible that a cold-blooded creature might sustain life in a torpid or hibernating condition, without food, and with a very small quantity of fresh air, supplied (let us say) from time to time through an almost imperceptible fissure?  It is well known that reptiles and amphibians are particularly tenacious of life, and that some turtles in particular will live for months, or even for years, without tasting food.  The common Greek tortoise, hawked on barrows about the streets of London and bought by a confiding British public under the mistaken impression that its chief fare consists of slugs and cockroaches (it is really far more likely to feed upon its purchaser’s choicest seakale and asparagus), buries itself in the ground at the first approach of winter, and snoozes away five months of the year in a most comfortable and dignified torpidity.  A snake at the Zoo has even been known to live eighteen months in a voluntary fast, refusing all the most tempting offers of birds and rabbits, merely out of pique at her forcible confinement in a strange cage.  As this was a lady snake, however, it is possible that she only went on living out of feminine obstinacy, so that this case really counts for very little.