Falling in Love

5. Seven Year Sleepers

For many generations past that problematical animal, the toad-in-a-hole

(literal, not culinary) has been one of the most familiar and

interesting personages of contemporary folk-lore and popular natural

history. From time to time he turns up afresh, with his own wonted

perennial vigour, on paper at least, in company with the great

sea-serpent, the big gooseberry, the shower of frogs, the two-headed

calf, and all the other common objects of the country or the seaside in

the silly season. No extraordinary natural phenomenon on earth was ever

better vouched for--in the fashion rendered familiar to us by the

Tichborne claimant--that is to say, no other could ever get a larger

number of unprejudiced witnesses to swear positively and unreservedly in

its favour. Unfortunately, however, swearing alone no longer settles

causes off-hand, as if by show of hands, 'the Ayes have it,' after the

fashion prevalent in the good old days when the whole Hundred used to

testify that of its certain knowledge John Nokes did not commit such and

such a murder; whereupon John Nokes was forthwith acquitted accordingly.

Nowadays, both justice and science have become more exacting; they

insist upon the unpleasant and discourteous habit of cross-examining

their witnesses (as if they doubted them, forsooth!), instead of

accepting the witnesses' own simple assertion that it's all right, and

there's no need for making a fuss about it. Did you yourself see the

block of stone in which the toad is said to have been found, before the

toad himself was actually extracted? Did you examine it all round to

make quite sure there was no hole, or crack, or passage in it anywhere?

Did you satisfy yourself after the toad was released from his close

quarters that no such hole, or crack, or passage had been dexterously

closed up, with intent to deceive, by plaster, cement, or other

artificial composition? Did you ever offer the workmen who found it a

nominal reward--say five shillings--for the first perfectly unanswerable

specimen of a genuine unadulterated antediluvian toad? Have you got the

toad now present, and can you produce him here in court (on writ of

_habeas corpus_ or otherwise), together with all the fragments of the

stone or tree from which he was extracted? These are the disagreeable,

prying, inquisitorial, I may even say insulting, questions with which a

modern man of science is ready to assail the truthful and reputable

gentlemen who venture to assert their discovery, in these degenerate

days, of the ancient and unsophisticated toad-in-a-hole.

Now, the worst of it is that the gentlemen in question, being unfamiliar

with what is technically described as scientific methods of

investigation, are very apt to lose their temper when thus

cross-questioned, and to reply, after the fashion usually attributed to

the female mind, with another question, whether the scientific person

wishes to accuse them of downright lying. And as nothing on earth could

be further from the scientific person's mind than such an imputation, he

is usually fain in the end to give up the social pursuit of postprandial

natural history (the subject generally crops up about the same time as

the after-dinner coffee), and to let the prehistoric toad go on his own

triumphant way, unheeded.

As a matter of fact, nobody ever makes larger allowances for other

people, in the estimate of their veracity, than the scientific

inquirer. Knowing himself, by painful experience, how extremely

difficult a matter it is to make perfectly sure you have observed

anything on earth quite correctly, and have eliminated all possible

chances of error, he acquires the fixed habit of doubting about one-half

of whatever his fellow-creatures tell him in ordinary conversation,

without for a single moment venturing to suspect them of deliberate

untruthfulness. Children and servants, if they find that anything they

have been told is erroneous, immediately jump at the conclusion that the

person who told them meant deliberately to deceive them; in their own

simple and categorical fashion they answer plumply, 'That's a lie.' But

the man of science is only too well acquainted in his own person with

the exceeding difficulty of ever getting at the exact truth. He has

spent hours of toil, himself, in watching and observing the behaviour of

some plant, or animal, or gas, or metal; and after repeated experiments,

carefully designed to exclude all possibility of mistake, so far as he

can foresee it, he at last believes he has really settled some moot

point, and triumphantly publishes his final conclusions in a scientific

journal. Ten to one, the very next number of that same journal contains

a dozen supercilious letters from a dozen learned and high-salaried

professors, each pointing out a dozen distinct and separate precautions

which the painstaking observer neglected to take, and any one of which

would be quite sufficient to vitiate the whole body of his observations.

There might have been germs in the tube in which he boiled the water

(germs are very fashionable just at present); or some of the germs might

have survived and rather enjoyed the boiling; or they might have adhered

to the under surface of the cork; or the mixture might have been

tampered with during the experimenter's temporary absence by his son,

aged ten years (scientific observers have no right, apparently, to have

sons of ten years old, except perhaps for purposes of psychological

research); and so forth, _ad infinitum_. And the worst of it all is that

the unhappy experimenter is bound himself to admit that every one of the

objections is perfectly valid, and that he very likely never really saw

what with perfect confidence he thought and said he had seen.

This being an unbelieving age, then, when even the book of Deuteronomy

is 'critically examined,' let us see how much can really be said for and

against our old friend, the toad-in-a-hole; and first let us begin with

the antecedent probability, or otherwise, of any animal being able to

live in a more or less torpid condition, without air or food, for any

considerable period of time together.

A certain famous historical desert snail was brought from Egypt to

England as a conchological specimen in the year 1846. This particular

mollusk (the only one of his race, probably, who ever attained to

individual distinction), at the time of his arrival in London, was

really alive and vigorous; but as the authorities of the British Museum,

to whose tender care he was consigned, were ignorant of this important

fact in his economy, he was gummed, mouth downward, on to a piece of

cardboard, and duly labelled and dated with scientific accuracy, '_Helix

desertorum_, March 25, 1846.' Being a snail of a retiring and contented

disposition, however, accustomed to long droughts and corresponding naps

in his native sand-wastes, our mollusk thereupon simply curled himself

up into the topmost recesses of his own whorls, and went placidly to

sleep in perfect contentment for an unlimited period. Every conchologist

takes it for granted, of course, that the shells which he receives from

foreign parts have had their inhabitants properly boiled and extracted

before being exported; for it is only the mere outer shell or skeleton

of the animal that we preserve in our cabinets, leaving the actual flesh

and muscles of the creature himself to wither unobserved upon its

native shores. At the British Museum the desert snail might have snoozed

away his inglorious existence unsuspected, but for a happy accident

which attracted public attention to his remarkable case in a most

extraordinary manner. On March 7, 1850, nearly four years later, it was

casually observed that the card on which he reposed was slightly

discoloured; and this discovery led to the suspicion that perhaps a

living animal might be temporarily immured within that papery tomb. The

Museum authorities accordingly ordered our friend a warm bath (who shall

say hereafter that science is unfeeling!), upon which the grateful

snail, waking up at the touch of the familiar moisture, put his head

cautiously out of his shell, walked up to the top of the basin, and

began to take a cursory survey of British institutions with his four

eye-bearing tentacles. So strange a recovery from a long torpid

condition, only equalled by that of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,

deserved an exceptional amount of scientific recognition. The desert

snail at once awoke and found himself famous. Nay, he actually sat for

his portrait to an eminent zoological artist, Mr. Waterhouse; and a

woodcut from the sketch thus procured, with a history of his life and

adventures, may be found even unto this day in Dr. Woodward's 'Manual of

the Mollusca,' to witness if I lie.

I mention this curious instance first, because it is the best

authenticated case on record (so far as my knowledge goes) of any animal

existing in a state of suspended animation for any long period of time

together. But there are other cases of encysted or immured animals

which, though less striking as regards the length of time during which

torpidity has been observed, are much more closely analogous to the real

or mythical conditions of the toad-in-a-hole. That curious West African

mud-fish, the Lepidosiren (familiar to all readers of evolutionary

literature as one of the most singular existing links between fish and

amphibians), lives among the shallow pools and broads of the Gambia,

which are dried up during the greater part of the tropical summer. To

provide against this annual contingency, the mud-fish retires into the

soft clay at the bottom of the pools, where it forms itself a sort of

nest, and there hibernates, or rather ********, for months together, in

a torpid condition. The surrounding mud then hardens into a dry ball;

and these balls are dug out of the soil of the rice-fields by the

natives, with the fish inside them, by which means many specimens of

lepidosiren have been sent alive to Europe, embedded in their natural

covering. Here the strange fish is chiefly prized as a zoological

curiosity for aquariums, because of its possessing gills and lungs

together, to fit it for its double existence; but the unsophisticated

West Africans grub it up on their own account as a delicacy, regardless

of its claims to scientific consideration as the earliest known ancestor

of all existing terrestrial animals. Now, the torpid state of the

mud-fish in his hardened ball of clay closely resembles the real or

supposed condition of the toad-in-a-hole; but with one important

exception. The mud-fish leaves a small canal or pipe open in his cell at

either end to admit the air for breathing, though he breathes (as I

shall proceed to explain) in a very slight degree during his *********;

whereas every proper toad-in-a-hole ought by all accounts to live

entirely without either feeding or breathing in any way. However, this

is a mere detail; and indeed, if toads-in-a-hole do really exist at all,

we must in all probability ultimately admit that they breathe to some

extent, though perhaps very slightly, during their long immurement.

And this leads us on to consider what in reality hibernation is.

Everybody knows nowadays, I suppose, that there is a very close analogy

between an animal and a steam-engine. Food is the fuel that makes the

animal engine go; and this food acts almost exactly as coal does in the

artificial machine. But coal alone will not drive an engine; a free

draught of open air is also required in order to produce combustion.

Just in like manner the food we eat cannot be utilised to drive our

muscles and other organs unless it is supplied with oxygen from the air

to burn it slowly inside our bodies. This oxygen is taken into the

system, in all higher animals, by means of lungs or gills. Now, when we

are working at all hard, we require a great deal of oxygen, as most of

us have familiarly discovered (especially if we are somewhat stout) in

the act of climbing hills or running to catch a train. But when we are

doing very little work indeed, as in our sleeping hours, during which

muscular movement is suspended, and only the general 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

winter. During this period of hibernation, the action of the heart is

reduced to a minimum, and the bear breathes but very slowly. Still, he

does breathe, and his heart does beat; and in performing those

indispensable functions, all his store of accumulated fat is gradually

used up, so that he wakes in spring as thin as a lath and as hungry as a

hunter. The machine has been working at very low pressure all the

winter: but it _has_ been working for all that, and the continuity of

its action has never once for a moment been interrupted. This is the

central principle of all hibernation; it consists essentially of a very

long and profound sleep, during which all muscular motion, except that

of the heart and lungs, is completely suspended, while even these last

are reduced to the very smallest amount compatible with the final

restoration of full animal activity.

Thus, even among warm-blooded animals like the bears and dormice,

hibernation actually occurs to a very considerable degree; but it is far

more common and more complete among cold-blooded creatures, whose bodies

do not need to be kept heated to the same degree, and with whom,

accordingly, hibernation becomes almost a complete torpor, the breathing

and the action of the heart being still further reduced to very nearly

zero. Mollusks in particular, like oysters and mussels, lead very

monotonous and uneventful lives, only varied as a rule by the welcome

change of being cut out of their shells and eaten alive; and their

powers of living without food under adverse circumstances are really

very remarkable. Freshwater snails and mussels, in cold weather, bury

themselves in the mud of ponds or rivers; and land-snails hide

themselves in the ground or under moss and leaves. The heart then

ceases perceptibly to beat, but respiration continues in a very faint

degree. The common garden snail closes the mouth of his shell when he

wants to hibernate, with a slimy covering; but he leaves a very small

hole in it somewhere, so as to allow a little air to get in, and keep up

his breathing to a slight amount. My experience has been, however, that

a great many snails go to sleep in this way, and never wake up again.

Either they get frozen to death, or else the respiration falls so low

that it never picks itself up properly when spring returns. In warm

climates, it is during the summer that mollusks and other mud-haunting

creatures go to sleep; and when they get well plastered round with clay,

they almost approach in tenacity of life the mildest recorded specimens

of the toad-in-a-hole.

For example, take the following cases, which I extract, with needful

simplifications, from Dr. Woodward.

'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.

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 is also undoubtedly true that they creep into holes wherever they can

find one, and that in these holes they lie torpid for a considerable

period. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that they

cannot live for more than a certain fixed and relatively short time

entirely without food or air. Dr. Buckland tried a number of experiments

upon toads in this manner--experiments wholly unnecessary, considering

the trivial nature of the point at issue--and his conclusion was that no

toad could get beyond two years without feeding or breathing. There can

be very little doubt that in this conclusion he was practically correct,

and that the real fine old crusted antediluvian toad-in-a-hole is really

a snare and a delusion.

That, however, does not wholly settle the question about such toads,

because, even though they may not be all that their admirers claim for

them, they may yet possess a very respectable antiquity of their own,

and may be very far from the category of mere vulgar cheats and

impostors. Because a toad is not as old as Methuselah, it need not

follow that he may not be as old as Old Parr; because he does not date

back to the Flood, it need not follow that he cannot remember Queen

Elizabeth. There are some toads-in-a-hole, indeed, which, however we may

account for the origin of their legend, are on the very face of it

utterly incredible. For example, there is the favourite and immensely

popular toad who was extracted from a perfectly closed hole in a marble

mantelpiece. The implication of the legend clearly is that the toad was

coeval with the marble. But marble is limestone, altered in texture by

pressure and heat, till it has assumed a crystalline structure. In other

words we are asked to believe that that toad lived through an amount of

fiery heat sufficient to burn him up into fine powder, and yet remains

to tell the tale. Such a toad as this obviously deserves no credit. His

discoverers may have believed in him themselves, but they will hardly

get other people to do so.

Still, there are a great many ways in which it is quite conceivable that

toads might get into holes in rocks or trees so as to give rise to the

common stories about them, and might even manage to live there for a

considerable time with very small quantities of food or air. It must be

remembered that from the very nature of the conditions the hole can

never be properly examined and inspected until after it has been split

open and the toad has been extracted from it. Now, if you split open a

tree or a rock, and find a toad inside it, with a cavity which he

exactly fills, it is extremely difficult to say whether there was or was

not a fissure before you broke the thing to pieces with your hatchet or

pickaxe. A very small fissure indeed would be quite sufficient to

account for the whole delusion; for if the toad could get a little air

to breathe slowly during his torpid period, and could find a few dead

flies or worms among the water that trickled scantily into his hole, he

could manage to drag out a peaceful and monotonous existence almost

indefinitely. Here are a few possible cases, any one of which will

quite suffice to give rise to at least as good a toad-in-the-hole as

ninety-nine out of a hundred published instances.

An adult toad buries himself in the mud by a dry pond, and gets coated

with a hard solid coat of sun-baked clay. His nodule is broken open with

a spade, and the toad himself is found inside, almost exactly filling

the space within the cavity. He has only been there for a few months at

the outside; but the clay is as hard as a stone, and to the bucolic mind

looks as if it might have been there ever since the Deluge. Good blue

lias clay, which dries as solid as limestone, would perform this trick

to perfection; and the toad might easily be relegated accordingly to the

secondary ages of geology. Observe, however, that the actual toads so

found are not the geological toads we should naturally expect under such

remarkable circumstances, but the common everyday toads of modern

England. This shows a want of accurate scientific knowledge on the part

of the toads which is truly lamentable. A toad who really wished to

qualify himself for the post ought at least to avoid presenting himself

before a critical eye in the foolish guise of an embodied anachronism.

He reminds one of the Roman mother in a popular burlesque, who suspects

her son of smoking, and vehemently declares that she smells tobacco,

but, after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters

to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco; that's not yet invented.'

A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember

that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was

not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the character of a

ceratodus or a labyrinthodon.

Again, another adult toad crawls into the hollow of a tree, and there

hibernates. The bark partially closes over the slit by which he entered,

but leaves a little crack by which air can enter freely. The grubs in

the bark and other insects supply him from time to time with a frugal

repast. There is no good reason why, under such circumstances, a placid

and contented toad might not manage to prolong his existence for several

consecutive seasons.

Once more, the spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the

individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal.

Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to

be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient

water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down

minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad

brought up under such peculiar circumstances might pass almost its

entire life in a state of torpidity, and yet might grow and thrive in

its own sleepy vegetative fashion.

In short, while it would be difficult in any given case to prove to a

certainty either that the particular toad-in-a-hole had or had not

access to air and food, the ordinary conditions of toad life are exactly

those under which the delusive appearance of venerable antiquity would

be almost certain frequently to arise. The toad is a nocturnal animal;

it lives through the daytime in dark and damp places; it shows a decided

liking for crannies and crevices; it is wonderfully tenacious of life;

it possesses the power of hibernation; it can live on extremely small

quantities of food for very long periods of time together; it buries

itself in mud or clay; it passes the early part of its life as a

water-haunting tadpole; and last, not least, it can swell out its body

to nearly double its natural size by inflating itself, which fully

accounts for the stories of toads being taken out of holes every bit as

big as themselves. Considering all these things, it would be wonderful

indeed if toads were not often found in places and conditions which

would naturally give rise to the familiar myth. Throw in a little

allowance for human credulity, human exaggeration, and human love of the

marvellous, and you have all the elements of a very excellent

toad-in-the-hole in the highest ideal perfection.

At the same time I think it quite possible that some toads, under

natural circumstances, do really remain in a torpid or semi-torpid

condition for a period far exceeding the twenty-four months allowed as

the maximum in Dr. Buckland's unpleasant experiments. If the amount of

air supplied through a crack or through the texture of the stone were

exactly sufficient for keeping the animal alive in the very slightest

fashion--the engine working at the lowest possible pressure, short of

absolute cessation--I see no reason on earth why a toad might not remain

dormant, in a moist place, with perhaps a very occasional worm or grub

for breakfast, for at least as long a time as the desert snail slept

comfortably in the British Museum. Altogether, while it is impossible to

believe the stories about toads that have been buried in a mine for

whole centuries, and still more impossible to believe in their being

disentombed from marble mantelpieces or very ancient geological

formations, it is quite conceivable that some toads-in-a-hole may really

be far from mere vulgar impostors, and may have passed the traditional

seven years of the Indian philosophers in solitary meditation on the

syllable Om, or on the equally significant Ko-ax, Ko-ax of the

irreverent Attic dramatist. "Certainly not a centenarian, but perhaps a

good seven-year sleeper for all that," is the final verdict which the

court is disposed to return, after due consideration of all the

probabilities _in re_ the toad-in-a-hole.