The following incident will show that they were not disturbed at seeing me standing near, assuming that they could or did see me. On one of my visits I took some pieces of scarlet ribbon to find out by an experiment if there was any truth in the old belief that the sight of scarlet will excite this serpent to anger. I approached them in the usual cautious way, until I was able, bending forward, to look down upon them reposing unalarmed on their bed of dry fern; then, gradually putting one hand out until it was over them, I dropped from it first one then another piece of silk so that they fell gently upon the edge of the platform. The adders must have seen these bright objects so close to them, yet they did not suddenly draw back their heads, nor exsert their tongues, nor make the least movement, but it was as if a dry, light, dead leaf, or a ball of thistledown, had floated down and settled near them, and they had not heeded it.
In the same way they probably saw me, and it was as if they had seen me not, since they did not heed my motionless figure; but that they always felt my presence after a time I felt convinced, for not only when I stood close to and looked down upon them, but also at a distance of four to eight yards, after gazing fixedly at them for some minutes, the change, the tremor, would appear, and in a little while they would steal away.
Enough has been said to show how much I liked the company of these adders, even when I knew that my presence disturbed their placid lives in some indefinable way. They were indeed more to me than all the other adders, numbering about a score, which I had found at their favourite basking-places in the neighbourhood. For they were often to be found in that fragrant, sequestered spot where their home was; and they were two together, of different types, both beautiful, and by observing them day by day I increased my knowledge of their kind. We do not know very much about "the life and conversation" of adders, having been too much occupied in "bruising" their shining beautiful bodies beneath our ironshod heels, and with sticks and stones, to attend to such matters. So absorbed was I in contemplating or else thinking about them at that spot that I was curiously indifferent to the other creatures—little lizards, and butterflies, and many young birds brought by their parents to the willows and alders that shaded the stream. All day the birds dozed on their gently swaying perches, chirping at intervals to be fed; and near by a tree-pipit had his stand, and sang and sang when most songsters were silent, but I paid no attention even to his sweet strains. Two or three hundred yards away, up the stream on a boggy spot, a pair of pewits had their breeding-place. They were always there, and invariably on my appearance they rose up and came to me, and, winnowing the air over my head, screamed their loudest. But I took no notice, and was not annoyed, knowing that their most piercing cries would have no effect on the adders, since their deaf ears heard nothing, and their brilliant eyes saw next to nothing, of all that was going on about them. After vexing their hearts in vain for a few minutes the pewits would go back to their own ground, then peace would reign once more.
A dead young pewit
One day I was surprised and a little vexed to find that the pewits had left their own ground to come and establish themselves on the bog within forty yards of the spot where I was accustomed to take my stand when observing the adders. Their anxiety at my presence had now become so intensified that it was painful to witness. I concluded that they had led their nearly grown-up young to that spot, and sincerely hoped that they would be gone on the morrow. But they remained there five days; and as their solicitude and frantic efforts to drive me away were renewed on each visit, they were a source of considerable annoyance. On the fourth day I accidentally discovered their secret. If I had not been so taken up with the adders, I might have guessed it. Going over the ground I came upon a dead full-grown young pewit, raised a few inches above the earth by the heather it rested on, its head dropped forward, its motionless wings partly open.
Usually at the moment of death a bird beats violently with its wings, and after death the wings remain half open. This was how the pewit had died, the wings half folded. Picking it up, I saw that it had been dead several days, though the carrion beetles had not attacked it, owing to its being several inches above the ground. It had, in fact, no doubt been already dead when I first found the old pewits settled at that spot; yet during those four hot, long summer days they had been in a state of the most intense anxiety for the safety of these dead remains! This is to my mind not only a very pathetic spectacle, but one of the strangest facts in animal life. The reader may say that it is not at all strange, since it is very common. It is most strange to me because it is very common, since if it were rare we could say that it was due to individual aberration, or resulted through the bluntness of some sense or instinct. What is wonderful and almost incredible is that the higher vertebrates have no instinct to guide them in such a case as I have described, and no inherited knowledge of death. To make of Nature a person, we may see that in spite of her providential care for all her children, and wise ordering of their lives down to the minutest detail, she has yet failed in this one thing. Her only provision is that the dead shall be speedily devoured; but they are not thus removed in numberless instances; a very familiar one is the sight of living and dead young birds, the dead often in a state of decay, lying together in one nest: and here we cannot but see that the dead become a burden and a danger to the living. Birds and mammals are alike in this. They will call, and wait for, and bring food to, and try to rouse the dead young or mate; day and night they will keep guard over it and waste themselves in fighting to save it from their enemies. Yet we can readily believe that an instinct fitted to save an animal from all this vain excitement, and labour, and danger, would be of infinite advantage to the species that possessed it.
Animals and their dead
In some social hymenopterous insects we see that the dead are removed; it would be impossible for ants to exist in communities numbering many thousands and tens of thousands of members crowded in a small space without such a provision. The dead ant is picked up by the first worker that happens to come that way and discovers it, and carried out and thrown away. Probably some chemical change which takes place in the organism on the cessation of life and makes it offensive to the living has given rise to this healthy instinct. The dead ant is not indeed seen as a dead fellow-being, but as so much rubbish, or "matter in the wrong place," and is accordingly removed. We can confidently say that this is not a knowledge of death, from what has been observed of the behaviour of ants on the death of some highly regarded individual in the nest—a queen, for instance. On this point I will quote a passage from the Rev. William Gould's Account of English Ants, dated 1747. His small book may be regarded as a classic, at all events by naturalists; albeit the editors of our Dictionary of National Biography have not thought proper to give him a place in that work, in which so many obscurities, especially of the nineteenth century, have had their little lives recorded.
It may be remarked in passing that the passage to be quoted is a very good sample of the style of our oldest entomologist, the first man in England to observe the habits of insects. His small volume dates many years before the Natural History of Selborne, and his style, it will be seen, is very different from that of Gilbert White. We know from Lord Avebury's valuable book on the habits of ants that Gould was not mistaken in these remarkable observations.