SQUIRRELS 69 
attitude of complete surrender (sce “Youatt on the 
Dog,” Amer. Edit., p. 34.) Even dogs would not be 
inclined to worry a fox apparently dead. And what of 
the feigning of the opossum? Romanes finds a special 
difficulty in this subject, because, as he says: “On the 
one hand, it is obvious that the idea of death and its 
conscious simulation would involve abstraction of a 
higher order than we could readily ascribe to any 
animal, and, on the other hand, it is not easy otherwise 
to explain the facts.” 
I cannot help thinking that this difficulty is a sample 
of those we make for ourselves by attempting to define 
and classify where Nature has left things complex and 
unsusceptible, of the sort of simple analysis after which 
Romanes and others are, in this instance, striving. 
If there is a vertebrate animal in which the feigning 
of death is an instinct, as pure as such an instinct can 
be, that animal is the opossum (Didelphys virginiana, 
Shaw). If invariability of behaviour under similar 
circumstances be essential to an instinct, then the 
opossum’s feigning is instinctive. From the account of 
a writer in the American Naturalist (vol. vi.) we 
learn that a Turkey Buzzard (Cathartes awra) may run 
upon an opossum and, after flapping his wings a few 
times over him, the opossum will go into a “spasm,” 
and the buzzard proceed to pick out its eyes, and 
“generally take a pretty good bite from its neck and 
shoulders.” From all that I have been able to learn of 
the behaviour of this animal in the presence of such 
circumstances as lead to its so-called feigning, I have 
been led to conclude that it is really largely, if not wholly, 
a condition allied to, if not identical with, Preyer’s 
cataplexy ; but no one seems to have given the subject 
that accurate examination necessary for a solution, 
in this, perhaps, the very best animal in which to test 
it. The creature is abundant, and could be captured at 
