At last the apparently deceased comes back to life. The tarsi quiver, those of the fore-legs first; the palpi and the antennae move slowly to and fro: this is the prelude to the awakening. Now the legs begin to kick. The insect bends slightly at its pinched waist; it buttresses itself on its head and back; it turns over. There it goes, jogging away, ready to become an apparent corpse once more if I renew my shock tactics. Let us repeat the experiment immediately. The newly resuscitated Beetle is for a second time lying motionless on his back. He prolongs his make-believe of death longer than he did at first. When he wakes up, I renew the test a third, a fourth, a fifth time, with no intervals of repose. The duration of the motionless condition increases each time. To quote the figures, the five consecutive experiments, from the first to the last, have continued respectively for 17, 20, 25, 33 and 50 minutes. Starting with a quarter of an hour, the attitude of death ends by lasting nearly a whole hour. Without being constant, similar facts recur repeatedly in my experiments, the duration, of course, varying. They tell us that as a general rule the Scarites lengthens the period of his lifeless posture the oftener the experiment is repeated. Is this a matter of practice, or is it an increase of cunning employed in the hope of finally tiring a too persistent enemy? It would be premature to draw conclusions: the cross-examination of the insect has not yet been thorough enough. Let us wait. Besides, we need not imagine that it is possible to go on like this until our patience is exhausted. Sooner or later, flurried by my pestering, the Scarites refuses to sham dead. Scarcely is he laid on his back after a fall, when he turns over and takes to his heels, as though he judged a stratagem which succeeded so indifferently to be henceforth useless. If we were to stop here, it would certainly seem that the insect, a cunning hoaxer, seeks, as a means of defence, to cheat those who attack him. He counterfeits death; he repeats the process, becoming more persistent in his fraud in proportion as the aggression is repeated; he abandons his trickery when he deems it futile. But hitherto we have subjected him only to a friendly examination-in-chief. The time has come to put a string of searching questions and to trick the trickster if there be really any deception. The Beetle under experiment is lying on the table. He feels beneath him a hard body which gives him no chance of digging. As he cannot hope to take refuge underground, an easy task for his nimble and vigorous tools, the Scarites lies low in his death-like pose, keeping it up, if need be, for an hour. If he were reclining on the sand, the loose soil with which he is so familiar, would he not regain his activity more rapidly, would he not at least betray by a few twitches his desire to escape into the basement?