quel 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 efficacity 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 weight, dangling feebly like a broken
stick. This conditions persists.

Is the Snail really dead? Not at all, for I am free to resuscitate the
seeming corpse. After two or three days of that singular condition
which is no longer life and yet not death, I isolate the patient and,
although this is not really necessary to success, I give him a douche
which will represent the shower so dear to the able-bodied mollusc. In
about a couple of days, my prisoner, but lately injured by the
Glow-worm's treachery, is restored to his normal state. He revives, in
a manner; he recovers movement and sensibility. He is affected by the
stimulus of a needle; he shifts his place, crawls, puts out his
tentacles, as though nothing unusual had occurred. The general torpor,
a sort of deep drunkenness, has vanished outright. The dead returns to
life. What name shall we give to that form of existence which, for a
time, abolishes the power of movement and the sense of pain? I can see
but one that is approximately suitable: anaesthesia. The exploits of a
host of Wasps whose flesh-eating grubs are provided with meat that is
motionless though not dead[2] have taught us the skilful art of the
paralyzing insect, which numbs the locomotory nerve-centres with its
venom. We have now a humble little a