Thus the oncoming and ceasing both of winter and summer sleep depend to a considerable extent upon conditions of existence other than those of temperature. Darwin saw scarcely a sign of a living thing on his arrival at Bahia Blanca, Argentina, on the 7th of Sept., although by digging several insects, large spiders and lizards were found in a half-torpid state. During the days of his visit when nature was dormant the mean temperature was 51°, the thermometer seldom rising above 55° at mid-day. But during the succeeding days when the mean temperature was 58° and that of the middle of the day between 60° and 70° both insect and reptilian life was in a state of activity. Nevertheless at Montevideo, lying only four degrees further north, between the 26th of July and the 19th of August when the mean temperature was 58.4° and the mean highest temperature of mid-day 65.5° almost every beetle, several genera of spiders, land molluscs, toads and lizards were all lying dormant beneath stones. Thus the animal-life at Montevideo remained dormant at a temperature which roused that at Bahia Blanca from its torpidity. Darwin unfortunately does not record whether the species observed were identical in the two localities.
The temperature of animals in a profound state of hibernation is approximately the same as that of the surrounding medium or at most a degree or two higher. If, however, the temperature of the chosen hibernaculum (winter quarters) falls as low as freezing point, life is endangered at least in the case of mammals.
In most cold-blooded animals, like reptiles, the temperature is normally only a little above that of the atmosphere, the two rising and falling together. But, setting aside the young, especially of those species in which the offspring are born or hatched at a comparatively early stage of development, the majority of warm-blooded animals are able to maintain a high and approximately level temperature irrespective of decline in the temperature of the surrounding medium. This faculty of temperature adjustment, however, appears to be absent or weakened in most if not in all hibernating mammals both in their normal nocturnal or diurnal sleep and in their winter sleep. In the case of European bats it has been shown that the ordinary day sleep in summer differs only in the matter of duration from the prolonged slumber of the same animals in winter. The temperature falls with that of the atmosphere, respiration practically ceases and immersion in water for as many as eleven minutes has been known to prove innocuous. At moderate temperatures ranging from 45° to 50° F., dormice (_Muscardinus avellanarius_) and hedgehogs (_Erinaceus europaeus_) alternately wake to feed and sink into slumber. Dormice awake once in every twenty-four hours; the sleep of the hedgehogs may last for two or three days. The temperature of the hedgehog, when awake and active, rises to about 87° F., that of the dormouse to 92° or 94° F.; but during sleep the temperature of both species falls to about that of the atmosphere. In other words, all the phenomena characteristic of hibernation are exhibited in these animals during the periods of sleep interrupting their periods of wakeful activity. Sleep of this nature, for which the term "diurnation" has been proposed, because it has only been observed in nocturnal animals, lies phenomenally midway between the normal sleep of non-hibernating mammals and the dormant condition in winter of hibernating species. The stimulus of hunger appears to be the prime cause of its periodic cessation. Since then the faculty of temperature adjustment is in abeyance during the ordinary diurnal summer sleep in hibernating mammals, which in this physiological particular resemble reptiles, it seems probable that hibernation can only be practised by those species in which the power to maintain, when sleeping, a permanent average high temperature has been lost or perhaps never acquired. That there is no broad line of demarcation between the ordinary sleep of these hibernating mammals in which the temperature is known to drop considerably and that of non-hibernating species is indicated by the fact that the temperature of human beings and possibly of all non-hibernating species falls to a certain, though to a limited, extent in ordinary sleep.