Chapter 4 Exercise 3a

Read this paragraph and answer the questions that follow.

Indians spoke of hibernation as the Long Sleep, but it is rather more than that. It is a profound oblivion halfway between sleep and death. It is an unknowing and unfeeling more deep and lasting than can be induced in man by the most powerful drugs, a suspension of life processes more thorough and protracted than even the "frozen slumber" which doctors have lately devised as a palliative of cancer. It is a phenomenon unique in nature, and though we are wiser about it than we were in those cradle-days of biology when Dr. Johnson thought that swallows [a kind of bird] passed the winter asleep in the mud at the bottom of the Thames, it remains a riddle still.
--Alan Devoe, "The Animals Sleep"

1. Write three content phrases from the paragraph (not transitions) that helped you arrive at your answer for question 3.


2. Explain what the writer means by the phrase "those cradle-days of biology."