s efficacious with small birds than with large ones? To judge by
the Pigeon, this may well be so. He yields to my art only to the
extent of two minutes' sleep. A still smaller bird, a Greenfinch, is
even more refractory: all that I obtain from him is a few seconds'
drowsiness.

It would appear, then, that, in proportion as the activity is
concentrated in a body of less volume, the torpor has less hold. The
insect has already shown us this. The Giant Scarites does not stir for
an hour, while the Smooth-skinned Scarites, a pigmy, wearies my
persistence in turning him over; the large Cloudy Buprestis submits to
my manoeuvres for a long period, whereas the Glittering Buprestis, a
pigmy again, obstinately refuses to do so.

We will leave on one side, as insufficiently investigated, the
influence of the bodily mass and remember only this fact, that it is
possible, by a very simple artifice, to reduce a bird to a condition
of apparent death. Do my Goose, my Turkey and the others resort to
trickery with the object of deceiving their tormentor? It is certain
that none of them thinks of shamming dead; they are actually immersed
in a deep torpor; in a word, they are hypnotized.

These facts have long been known; they are perhaps the first in date
in the science of hypnosis or artificial sleep. How did we, the little
Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey's slumber? It was
certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where,
indestructible as everything that enters into children's games, it was
handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.

Things are just the same to-day in my village of Serignan, where there
are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep.
Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us
that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point
of our knowledge of hypnosis.

I have just been practising on insects tricks which to all appearances
are as puerile as those which we practised on the Turkeys in the days
when the farmer's wife used to run after us cracking her whip. Do not
laugh: a serious problem looms behind this artlessness.

My insects' condition bears a strange resemblance to that of my
poultry. Both present the image of death, inertia, the contraction of
convulsed limbs. In both again the immobility is dispelled before its
time by the agency of a stimulus, by sound in the case of the bird, by
light in