These ruses are very simple. To go in search of the layer-out of bodies, who exists only here and there in the country-side, would be almost always waste of time; the favourable month, April, would elapse before my cage was suitably populated. To run after him is to trust too much to accident; so we will make him come to us by scattering in the orchard an abundant collection of dead Moles. To this carrion, ripened by the sun, the insect will not fail to hasten from the various points of the horizon, so accomplished is he in the detection of such a delicacy. I make an arrangement with a gardener in the neighbourhood, who, two or three times a week, supplements the penury of my acre and a half of stony ground, providing me with vegetables raised in a better soil. I explain to him my urgent need of Moles, an indefinite number of moles. Battling daily with trap and spade against the importunate excavator who uproots his crops, he is in a better position than any one else to procure for me that which I regard for the moment as more precious than his bunches of asparagus or his white-heart cabbages. The worthy man at first laughs at my request, being greatly surprised by the importance which I attribute to the abhorrent creature, the Darboun; but at last he consents, not without a suspicion at the back of his mind that I am going to make myself a wonderful flannel-lined waist-coat with the soft, velvety skins of the Moles, something good for pains in the back. Very well. We settle the matter. The essential thing is that the Darbouns shall reach me. They reach me punctually, by twos, by threes, by fours, packed in a few cabbage-leaves, at the bottom of the gardener's basket. The worthy man who lent himself with such good grace to my strange requirements will never guess how much comparative psychology will owe him! In a few days I was the possessor of thirty Moles, which were scattered here and there, as they reached me, in bare portions of the orchard, amid the rosemary-bushes, the arbutus-trees, and the lavender-beds. Now it only remained to wait and to examine, several times a day, the under-side of my little corpses, a disgusting task which any one would avoid who had not the sacred fire in his veins. Only little Paul, of all the household, lent me the aid of his nimble hand to seize the fugitives. I have already stated that the entomologist has need of simplicity of mind. In this important business of the Necrophori, my assistants were a child and an illiterate. Little Paul's visits alternating with mine, we had not long to wait. The four winds of heaven bore forth in all directions the odour of the carrion; and the undertakers hurried up, so that the experiments, begun with four subjects, were continued with fourteen, a number not attained during the whole of my previous searches, which were unpremeditated and in which no bait was used as decoy. My trapper's ruse was completely successful.