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.

Toads themselves are well known to possess all the qualities of mind and
body which go to make up the career of a successful and enduring
anchorite. At the best of times they eat seldom and sparingly, while a
forty days' fast, like Dr. Tanner's, would seem to them but an ordinary
incident in their everyday existence. In the winter they hibernate by
burying themselves in the mud, or by getting down cracks in the ground.
It i