In performing this work what do they expend on materials? Nothing. From the first day of their imprisonment all food is cut off. The thought occurs to the mind of nutritive reserves, of adipose savings accumulated in the organism. The animal, according to this, in order to balance the expenditure of energy, would live upon itself.
With portly adults the explanation would be valid in a certain measure; but I have subjected lean specimens, of medium age, to the test; I have selected young ones, just beginning life. What can these small Scorpions have in their bellies? What do they possess that can be transformed into motor [[49]]energy by vital oxidation? The scalpel cannot find it and the imagination refuses to appraise it, so great is the disproportion between the amount of work accomplished and the worker’s bulk. If the whole animal were before all a combustible and were to burn to the last atom, the total sum of heat emitted would still be far from equivalent to the total sum of the mechanical effects. Our factories cannot keep an engine going, all the year round, with a lump of coal as its whole provision.
My Scorpions hardly seem to consume even this lump of fuel. After a long and rigorous abstinence, they are as fresh and brightly-coloured, as glossy with health as at the beginning of the experiment.
We can understand the Snail, sunk in a deep inertia and contracted within his shell, whose opening he has closed with a chalky lid or a parchment cover: he no longer eats, but neither does he see; he exists on his reserves by slowing down his vital processes to the lowest possible limits. The Scorpion, always moving about, despite the excessive prolongation of the fast, is beyond our comprehension. [[50]]
For the third time in the course of our studies, with reference to the young first of the Lycosa[8], then of the Clotho Spider[9], and now of the Scorpion, we are led back to the same suspicion. Is it a fact that animals of an organization very different from our own, deprived of an individual temperature determined by an active oxidation, are governed by biological laws which are immutable in the whole series of living creatures? Need movement in them be always the result of combustion for which eating would furnish the materials? Might they not derive their activity, at least in part, from the circumambient energies, heat, electricity, light and so on, varying modes of the same motive power?
These energies are the soul of the world, the unfathomable vortex which sets the material universe in motion. Would it then be paradoxical to picture the animal in certain cases as a highly perfected accumulator, capable of collecting the circumambient heat, of transmuting it in its tissues into a mechanical equivalent and of returning [[51]]it in the form of motion? This would suggest a possibility that the animal might perform work in the absence of energizing matter absorbed as food.
Ah, life made a superb discovery when, in prehistoric times, it invented the Scorpion! To work without eating: what an incomparable gift, had it become general! What miseries, what horrors would be abolished, if we were freed from the tyranny of the stomach! Why was this wonderful attempt not continued, why was it not perfected in creatures of a higher order? What a pity that the initial example was not followed in an ever-increasing progression! Then perhaps to-day, exempted from the ignominious hunt for food, thought, the loftiest and most delicate expression of activity, would restore itself after fatigue with a ray of sunshine.
Of this gift of yore, full of unrealized promises, certain constituents have nevertheless been disseminated throughout the animal kingdom. We ourselves live by solar radiation; we derive part of our energy from it. The Arab, supporting existence on a handful of dates, is no less active than [[52]]the man of the north, gorged with meat and beer; though he does not fill his stomach so plentifully, he has a bigger share in the banquet of the sun.
All things considered then, the Scorpion must derive the main part of his energizing food from the circumambient warmth. As for the plastic food indispensable to physical growth, its turn comes, a little sooner or later, announced by a moult. The stiff tunic splits along the back; the animal slips gently out of its cast clothes, which have become too tight. Then comes the imperious call for food, were it only to make good the cost of the new skin. Henceforth, if the fast continues, my prisoners, especially the smaller ones, die before long. [[53]]