90 THE WONDERS OF INSTINCT 



or vertical indifferently; but the Mole, always fixed by 

 a hinder limb to the top of the twig, does not touch the 

 soil; he hangs a few fingers'-breadths from the ground, 

 out of the sextons' reach. 



What will the latter do ? Will they scrape at the foot 

 of the gibbet in order to overturn it? By no means ; and 

 the ingenuous observer who looked for such tactics would 

 be greatly disappointed. No attention is paid to the base 

 of the support. It is not vouchsafed even a stroke of 

 the rake. Nothing is done to overturn it, nothing, abso- 

 lutely nothing! It is by other methods that the Burying- 

 beetles obtain the Mole. 



These decisive experiments, repeated under many dif- 

 ferent forms, prove that never, never in this world do 

 the Necrophori dig, or even give a superficial scrape, at 

 the foot of the gallows, unless the hanging body touch 

 the ground at that point. And, in the latter case, if the 

 twig should happen to fall, its fall is in nowise an inten- 

 tional result, but a mere fortuitous effect of the burial 

 already commenced. 



What, then, did the owner of the Frog of whom Gled- 

 ditsch tells us really see? If his stick was overturned, 

 the body placed to dry beyond the assaults of the Necro- 

 phori must certainly have touched the soil : a strange pre- 

 caution against robbers and the damp! We may fit- 

 tingly attribute more foresight to the preparer of dried 

 Frogs and allow him to hang the creature some inches 

 from the ground. In this case all my experiments em- 

 phatically assert that the fall of the stake undermined by 

 the sextons is a pure matter of imagination. 



