ing
death which I witnessed on the threshold of the burrows. When struck in
the abdomen and then placed in a large bottle that leaves its movements
free, the insect seems, at first, to have suffered no serious injury. It
flutters about and buzzes. But half an hour has not elapsed before death
is imminent. The insect lies motionless upon its back or side. At most,
a few movements of the legs, a slight pulsation of the belly, continuing
till the morrow, proclaim that life has not yet entirely departed. Then
everything ceases: the Carpenter-bee is a corpse.

The importance of this experiment compels our attention. When stung in
the neck, the powerful Bee dies on the spot; and the Spider has not to
fear the dangers of a desperate struggle. Stung elsewhere, in the
abdomen, the insect is capable, for nearly half an hour, of making use of
its dart, its mandibles, its legs; and woe to the Lycosa whom the
stiletto reaches. I have seen some who, stabbed in the mouth while
biting close to the sting, died of the wound within the twenty-four
hours. That dangerous prey, therefore, requires instantaneous death,
produced by the injury to the nerve-centres of the neck; otherwise, the
hunter's life would often be in jeopardy.

The Grasshopper order supplied me with a second series of victims: Green
Grasshoppers as long as one's finger, large-headed Locusts, Ephippigerae.
{12} The same result follows when these are bitten in the neck:
lightning death. When injured elsewhere, notably in the abdomen, the
subject of the experiment resists for some time. I have seen a
Grasshopper, bitten in the belly, cling firmly for fifteen hours to the
smooth, upright wall of the glass bell that constituted his prison. At
last, he dropped off and died. Where the Bee, that delicate organism,
succumbs in less than half an hour, the Grasshopper, coarse ruminant that
he is, resists for a whole day. Put aside these differences, caused by
unequal degrees of organic sensitiveness, and we sum up as follows: when
bitten by the Tarantula in the neck, an insect, chosen from among the
largest, dies on the spot; when bitten elsewhere, it perishes also, but
after a lapse of time which varies considerably in the different
entomological orders.

This explains the long hesitation of the Tarantula, so wearisome to the
experimenter when he presents to her, at the entrance to the burrow, a
rich, but dangerous prey. The majority refuse to fling themselves up