As the Polar Bear resides principally on the fields of ice, he is frequently drifted far from the land. " In this way," says Sir John Richardson, "they are often carried from the coast of Greenland to Iceland, where they commit such ravages on the flocks that the inhabitants rise in a body to destroy them." The Esquimaux account of the hybernation of this species is thus related by Captain Lyon :— " At the commencement of winter the pregnant she-bears are very fat, and always solitary. When a heavy fall of snow sets in, the animal seeks some hollow place in which she can lie down, and then remains quiet while the snow covers her. Sometimes she will wait until a quantity of snow has fallen, and then digs herself a cave : at all events, it seems necessary that she should be covered by and lie amongst snow. She now goes to sleep, and does not wake until the spring sun is pretty high, when she brings forth her two cubs. The cave, by this time, has become much larger, by the effect of the animal's warmth and breath, so that the cubs have room enough to move, and they acquire considerable strength by continually sucking. The data at length becomes so thin and weak, that it is with great difficulty she extricates herself, when the sun is powerful enough to throw a strong glare through the snow which roofs the den. The Esquimaux affirm, that during this long confinement the bear has no 'evacuations, and is herself the means of preventing them by slopping all the natural passages with moss, grass, or earth. The natives find and kill the bears during their confinement by means of dogs, which scent them through the snow, and begin scratching and howling very eagerly. As it would be unsafe to make a large opening, a long trench is cut, of sufficient width to enable a man to look down, and see where the bear's head lies, and he then selects a mortal part into which he thrusts his spear. The old one being killed, the hole is broken open, and the young cubs may be taken out by hand, as, having tasted no blood, and never having been at liberty, they are then very harmless and quiet. Females which are not pregnant roam throughout the whole winter in the same manner as the males. The coupling time is in May." That part of these accounts which relates to the non-hybernation of some of these bears is corroborated by Sir Edward Parry, who saw them roaming in the course of the two winters which he passed on the coast of Melville Peninsula.
That the Polar Bear will subsist on vegetable diet was proved in the case of two which lived and throve for years in the French menagerie without being allowed to touch animal food. The indi vidual kept in the Tower in the reign of Henry III. seems to have been indulged iu diet and recreation more congenial to its habits, for there are two of the king's writs extant in choice Latin, directing the sheriffs of London to furnish four-pence a day for "our white bear hi our Tower of London, and his keeper," and to provide a muzzle and iron-chain to hold him when out of the water, and a long and strong rope to hold him when he is fishing in the Thames. (Medea, ' Exchequer Writs.') Fossil Bears.
The fossil remains of these animals, when first found, ministered, as might have been expected from the spirit of the age, to the specu lations of the lovers of the marvellous, and figured in the medical prescriptions of the time. The caverns of the neighbourhood of the Harz were ransacked for them ; and their supposed virtue as medicines, under the title of fossil Unicorns' Bones, procured a ready sale. In the Protogica' of Leibnitz, there is a figure of one of these fossil unicorns, the product of an imagination sufficiently lively.
But it was not till the year 1672, as Cuvier observes, that any notice, truly osteological, appeared on the subject, when Hayn gave some representations of their bones brought from a cave of the Carpathians, as those of dragons; and, by way of helping the evidence, informed his readers that there were still to be found in Transylvania dragons alive and flying.
These were the remains of the extinct Bear of the Caves (Uraus spelceus), an animal which must have been the largest species of the genus. Rosennifiller, in 1794 and 1795, gave the figure of a cranium from Gailenreuth ; and John Hunter, in the `Philosophical Trans actions' (1794), described the bones found there ; and the Margrave of Anspach the caves.
Blumenbach distinguished the skulls found iu the caverns as those of two distinct species, and gave them severally the names of Ur811,3 apelalis and Ursus arctoideus, which Cuvier adopted, expressing however his opinion that they were only varieties of the same species. Goldfuss described a species as U. prisms from the same remains.
The principal caverns in which these remains have been found are those of Scharzfeld and Baumann, the latter of which owes its name (Baumann's Hohle) to a wretehed miner, who in 1670 lured by the hope of finding ore sought its recesses. There he wandered, alone and in darkness, three days and three nights. At length he found his way out, but in so exhausted a condition, that he only returned to the light of day to die.
The caverns of the Carpathians supplied the dragons bones above mentioned.
In Franconia, near Muggendorf, the caves are numerous, and abound in bones. Here are the caverns of Gailenreuth, Rabeustein, Kiih loch, &e.
The south-west border of the Thuringerwald has those of Chicks brunn and Lcibenstein, near Meinungen, and Westphalia those of Kliiterhohle and Sundwicke • In England the remains of Bears have been found in the largest numbers in Kent's Hole, near Torquay. They have also been found in Tertiary deposits at Grays in Essex, Becton in Norfolk, in the valley of the Severn near Tewkesbury, the Manea Fen iu Cambridge shire, at Newbourn in Suffolk, and in other places. Professor Owen, in his 'Iliatory of British Fossil Mammals,' refers these remains to U. Arctos, U. prisms, and U. spelmus. He doubts the existence of the fossil species U. arctoideus and U. planus. Dr. Buekland (` Reliquice Diluviamel thus describes the scene in the cavern of Kiihloeh :—" It is literally true, that in this single cavern (the size and proportions of which are nearly equal to those of the interior of a large church) there are hundreds of cart-loads of black auhnal dust, entirely covering the whole floor, to a depth which, if we multiply this depth by the length and breadth of the cavern, will be found to exceed 5000 cubic feet. The whole of this masa has been again and again dug over in search of teeth and bones, which it still contains abundantly, though in broken fragments. The state of these is very different from that of the bones we find in any of the other caverns, being of a black, or, more properly speaking, dark umber-colour throughout, and many of them readily crumbling .under the finger into a soft dark powder, resembling mummy powder, and being of the same nature with the black earth in which they are imbedded. 7he quantity of animal matter accumulated on this floor is the most surprising and the only thing of the kind I ever witnessed ; and many hundred, I may say thousand, individuals must have contributed their remains to make up this appalling mass of the dust of death. It seems, in great part, to be derived from comminuted and pulverised bone ; for. the fleshy parts of animal bodies produce, by their decomposition, so small a quantity of permanent earthy residuum, that we must seek for the origin of this mass principally in decayed bones. The cave is so dry, that the black earth lies in the state of loose powder, and rises in dust under the feet : it also retains so large a proportion of its original animal matter, that it is occasionally used by the peasants as an enriching manure for the adjacent The following is added by Dr. Buckland iu a note :—" I have stated, that the total quantity of animal matter that lies within this cavern cannot be computed at less than 5000 cubio feet. Now, allowing two cubic feet of dust and bones for each individual animal, we shall have in this single vault the remains of at least 2500 boars, a number which may have been supplied in the apace of 1000 years, by • mortality at the rate of 21 per annum." The remains of Ursua spehrus have been found near Steyer, in Upper Austria. Necker de Saussure found them also in the clefts of the rocks containing iron ore at Kropp, in Candela.