This is enough. Patient, persecuted creature, you have half-betrayed your insect. When the Fly tickles you, drains your moist lip, treats you as a corpse whose juices she would like to suck; when the huge Capricorn appears to your horrified gaze and puts a foot on your belly, as though to take possession of his prey; when the table quivers, that is to say, when, for you, the ground shakes, undermined perhaps by some invader of your burrow; when a bright light surrounds you, favouring the designs of your enemies and imperilling your safety as an insect that loves the dark, then, in truth, it would be wiser not to move, if really your chief resource, when danger threatens you, is to simulate death. On the contrary, at those critical moments, you give a start; you move, you resume your normal attitude, you run away. Your fraud 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.