-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 Withdrawn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