lar climatic conditions,
would retain his powers of action in ordinary life. I have a
convenient refrigerator at my disposal. It is the water of my well,
whose temperature, in summer, is nearly twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit
below that of the surrounding air.

The Buprestis, in whom I have just produced inertia by means of a few
taps, is installed on his back in a little flask which I seal
hermetically and immerse in a bucket full of this cold water. To keep
the bath as cool as at first, I gradually renew it, taking care not to
shake the flask in which the patient is lying, in his attitude of
death.

The result rewards my pains. After five hours under water, the insect
is still motionless. Five hours, I say, five long hours; and I might
certainly say longer, if my exhausted patience had not put an end to
the experiment. But this is enough to banish any idea of fraud on the
insect's part. Here, beyond a doubt, the insect is not shamming dead.
He is actually somnolent, deprived of the power of movement by an
internal disturbance which my teasing produced at the outset and which
is prolonged beyond its usual limits by the surrounding coolness.

I try the effect of a slight decrease in temperature upon the Giant
Scarites by subjecting him to a similar sojourn in the cold water of
the well. The result does not respond to the hopes which the Buprestis
gave me. I do not succeed in obtaining more than fifty minutes'
inertia. I have often obtained as long periods of immobility without
resorting to the refrigerating artifice.

It might have been foreseen. The Buprestis, a lover of the burning
sunshine, is affected by the cold bath in a different degree from the
Scarites, who prowls about by night and spends his day in the
basement. A fall of a few degrees in temperature takes the chilly
insect by surprise and has no effect upon the one accustomed to the
coolness underground.

Other experiments on these lines tell me nothing more. I see the inert
condition persisting sometimes for a longer, sometimes for a shorter
period, according as the insect seeks the sunlight or avoids it. Let
us change our method.

I evaporate a few drops of sulphuric ether in a glass jar and put in a
Stercoraceous Geotrupes and a specimen of _Buprestis tenebrionis_, at
the same time. In a few moments both subjects are motionless,
anaesthetized by the etheric vapour. I take them out quickly and lay
them on their backs in the open air.

Their attitud