The bird would not be duped by this clumsy stratagem. In those happy days when the discovery of a nest marked a red-letter day, I never saw my Sparrows or Greenfinches refuse a Locust because he was not moving, or a Fly because she was dead. Any mouthful that does not kick is eagerly accepted, provided that it be fresh and pleasant to the taste.
If the insect, therefore, relies on the appearance of death, it would seem to me to be very badly inspired. More wary than the Bear in the fable, the bird, with its perspicacious eye, will recognize the fraud in a moment and proceed to business. Besides, had the object really been a corpse, but still fresh, it would none the less have gobbled it up.
More insistent doubts occur to my mind when I consider the serious consequences to which the insect's artfulness might lead. It shams dead, says the popular idiom, which recks little of weighing the value of its term; it simulates death, scientific language repeats, happy to find some gleams of reason in the insect. What truth is there in this unanimous statement, which in the one case is too unreflecting and in the other too much inclined to favour theoretical fancies?
Logical arguments are insufficient here. It is essential that we should obtain the verdict of experiment, which alone can furnish a valid reply. But to which of the insects shall we go first?
I remember something that dates back some forty years. Delighted with a recent University triumph, I was staying at Cette, on my return from Toulouse, where I had just passed my examination as a licentiate in natural science. It gave me a fine chance of renewing my acquaintance with the seaside flora, which had delighted me a few years before on the shores of the wonderful Gulf of Ajaccio. It would have been foolish to neglect it. A degree does not confer the right to cease studying. If one really has a touch of the sacred fire in one's veins, one remains a student all one's life, not of books, which are a poor resource, but of the great, inexhaustible school of actual things.
One day, then, in July, in the cool stillness of the dawn, I was botanizing on the foreshore at Cette. For the first time I plucked the Convolvulus soldanella, which trails along the high-water mark its ropes of glossy green leaves and its great pink bellflowers. Withdrawn into his white, flat, heavily-keeled shell, a curious Snail, Helix explanata, was slumbering, in groups, on the bent grasses.
The dry shifting sands showed here and there long series of imprints, recalling, on a smaller scale and under another form, the tracks of little birds in the snow which used to arouse a delightful flutter in my youthful days. What do these imprints mean?
I follow them, a hunter on the trail of a new species. At the end of each track, by digging to no great depth, I unearth a magnificent Carabus, whose very name is almost unknown to me. It is the Giant Scarites (S. gigas, FAB.).
I make him walk on the sand. He exactly reproduces the tracks which put me on the alert. It was certainly he who, questing for game in the night, marked the trail with his feet. He returned to his lair before daylight; and now not a single Beetle is to be seen in the open.
Another characteristic thrusts itself upon my notice. If I shake him for a moment and then place him on the ground upon his back, he remains a long time without stirring. No other insect has yet displayed such persistent immobility, though I confess that my investigations in this respect have been only superficial. The detail is so thoroughly engraved on my memory that, forty years later, when I want to experiment on the insects which are experts in the art of simulating death, I at once think of the Scarites.