hat is all.

The insect repeatedly taps the Snail's mantle with its instrument. It
all happens with such gentleness as to suggest kisses rather than
bites. As children, teasing one another, we used to talk of "tweaksies"
to express a slight squeeze of the finger-tips, something more like a
tickling than a serious pinch. Let us use that word. In conversing with
animals, language loses nothing by remaining juvenile. It is the right
way for the simple to understand one another.

The Lampyris doles out his tweaks. He distributes them methodically,
without hurrying, and takes a brief rest after each of them, as though
he wished to ascertain the effect produced. Their number is not great:
half a dozen, at most, to subdue the prey and deprive it of all power
of movement. That other pinches are administered later, at the time of
eating, seems very likely, but I cannot say anything for certain,
because the sequel escapes me. The first few, however--there are never
many--are enough to impart inertia and loss of all feeling to the
Mollusc, thanks to the prompt, I might almost say lightning, methods of
the Lampyris, who, beyond a doubt, instils some poison or other by
means of his grooved hooks.

Here is the proof of the sudden efficacy of those twitches, so mild in
appearance: I take the Snail from the Lampyris, who has operated on the
edge of the mantle some four or five times. I prick him with a fine
needle in the fore-part, which the animal, shrunk into its shell, still
leaves exposed. There is no quiver of the wounded tissues, no reaction
against the brutality of the needle. A corpse itself could not give
fewer signs of life.

Here is something even more conclusive: chance occasionally gives me
Snails attacked by the Lampyris while they are creeping along, the foot
slowly crawling, the tentacles swollen to their full extent. A few
disordered movements betray a brief excitement on the part of the
Mollusc and then everything ceases: the foot no longer slugs; the front
part loses its graceful swan-neck curve; the tentacles become limp and
give way under their own weight, dangling feebly like a broken stick.
This condition persists.

Is the Snail really dead? Not at all, for I can resuscitate the seeming
corpse at will. After two or three days of that singular condition
which is no longer life and yet not death, I isolate the patient and,
though this is not really essential to success, I give him a douche
which will repres