is
discovered; or, to put it more plainly, there is no trick. Your
inertia is not simulated; it is real. It is a condition of temporary
torpor into which you are plunged by your delicate nervous
organization. A mere nothing makes you fall into it; a mere nothing
withdraws you from it, above all a bath of light, that sovran stimulus
of activity.

In respect of prolonged immobility as the result of emotion, I find a
rival of the Giant Scarites in a large black Buprestis, with a
flour-speckled corselet, a lover of the blackthorn, the hawthorn and
the apricot-tree. His name is _Capnodis tenebrionis_, LIN. At times I
see him, with his legs closely folded and his antennae lowered,
prolonging his motionless posture upon his back for more than an hour.
At other times the insect is bent upon escaping, apparently influenced
by atmospheric conditions of which I do not know the secret. One or
two minutes' immobility is as much as I can then obtain.

Let me recapitulate: in my various subjects the attitude of death is
of very variable duration, governed as it is by a host of unsuspected
circumstances. Let us take advantage of favourable opportunities,
which are fairly frequent. I subject the Cloudy Buprestis to the
different tests undergone by the Giant Scarites. The results are the
same. When you have seen the first, you have seen the second. There is
no need to linger over them.

I will only mention the promptness with which the Buprestis, lying
motionless in the shade, recovers his activity when I carry him away
from my table into the broad sunlight of the window. After a few
seconds of this bath of heat and light, the insect half-opens his
wing-cases, using them as levers, and turns over, ready to take flight
if my hand did not instantly snap him up. He is a passionate lover of
the light, a devotee of the sun, intoxicating himself in its rays upon
the bark of his blackthorn-trees on the hottest afternoons.

This love of tropical temperature suggests the following question:
what would happen if I were to chill the creature in its immobile
posture? I foresee a more prolonged inertia. The chill, of course,
must not be great, for it would be followed by the lethargy into which
insects capable of surviving the winter fall when benumbed by the
cold.

On the contrary, the Buprestis must as far as possible retain his full
vitality. The lowering of the temperature must be gentle, very
moderate and such that the insect, under simi