526 DECEPTION. 



All these animals must realise their danger, must possess 

 a sense of danger, must have generalised ideas of peril based 

 on individual experiences, as well as a feeling of the desira- 

 bility of escaping it, of consulting their personal safety, with 

 a knowledge of the proper means of escape, and the power of 

 instantly applying their knowledge. There are also involved 

 such mental qualities as presence of mind or self-possession, 

 self-command or self-control, fertility of resource or inge- 

 nuity, patience, reasoning, reflection, cunning. 



The successful feigning of death is usually or frequently 

 simply the assumption and maintenance of rigid immobility. 

 But it does not follow, per contra, that such immobility, when 

 voluntarily assumed, is so for the purpose of feigning death 

 and of avoiding danger. In certain cases the cause, object 

 or motive is of a very different kind. Thus the object may 

 be to dissipate fear, if not to inspire confidence, in intended 

 prey, so as to allow them to go on with their feeding or other 

 occupations till the proper opportunity for capture arrives. 

 This is the case, for instance, with a certain Nicaraguan 

 hawk, in order to deceive his prey small birds. He sits 

 motionless on a tree-bough till his opportunity presents itself 

 (Belt). On the other hand, a certain Nicaraguan locust, 

 when suddenly surrounded by foraging ants, assumes immo- 

 bility to save its life. Such was its maintenance of this 

 condition, such its conviction, apparently, that its salvation 

 depended on its motionlessness, ' that it allowed me to pick 

 it up and replace it among the ants without making a 

 single effort to escape/ says Belt. Berkeley mentions a 

 young stoat lying still as death when her mother had been 

 shot, and the dogs and hunters approached ; which motion- 

 lessness may have been here, however, the paralysis, and 

 resulting immobility, of fear or bewilderment in and from 

 the suddenness of bereavement, and the presence of two 

 classes of enemies. 



A young merganser deceived the Duke of Argyll and a 

 party of his visitors at Inverary, simply by remaining per- 

 fectly still on ground on which it was inconspicuous by 

 reason of the protective resemblance or mimicry of its colour, 

 a manoeuvre involving great self-command in so young an 



