the stag-beetle—evening flight—appearance on the wing—seeking a mate—stag and doe in a hedge—the ploughman and the beetle—a stag-beetle's fate—concerning tenacity of life—life appearances after death—a serpent's skin—a dead glow-worm's light—little summer tragedies—a snaky spot—an adder's basking-place—watching adders—the adder's senses—adder's habits not well known—a pair of anxious pewits—a dead young pewit—animals without knowledge of death—removal of the dead by ants—gould's observations on ants.

the stag-beetle

during the last week in june we can look for the appearance of our most majestical insect; he is an evening flyer, and a little before sunset begins to show himself abroad. he is indeed a monarch among hexapods, with none to equal him save, perhaps, the great goblin moth; and in shape and size and solidity he bears about the same relation to pretty bright flies as a horned rhinoceros does to volatile squirrels and monkeys and small barred and spotted felines. this is the stag-beetle—"stags and does" is the native name for the two sexes; he is probably more abundant in this corner of hampshire than in any other locality in england, and among the denizens of the forest there are few more interesting. about four or five o'clock in the afternoon, the ponderous beetle wakes out of his long siesta, down among the roots and dead vegetable matter of a thorny brake or large hedge, and laboriously sets himself to work {70} his way out. he is a slow, clumsy creature, a very bad climber; and small wonder, when we consider how he is impeded by his long branched horns when endeavouring to make his way upwards through a network of interlacing stems.

as you walk by the hedge-side a strange noise suddenly arrests your attention; it is the buzz of an insect, but loud enough to startle you; it might be mistaken for the reeling of a nightjar, but is perhaps more like the jarring hum of a fast-driven motor-car. the reason of the noise is that the beetle has with great pains climbed up a certain height from the ground, and, in order to ascertain whether he has got far enough, he erects himself on his stand, lifts his wing-cases, shakes out his wings, and begins to agitate them violently, turning this way and that to make sure that he has a clear space. if he then attempts to fly—it is one of his common blunders—he instantly strikes against some branch or cluster of leaves, and is thrown down. the tumble does not hurt him in the least, but so greatly astonishes him that he remains motionless a good while; then recovering his senses, he begins to ascend again. at length, after a good many accidents and adventures by the way, he gets to a topmost twig, and, after some buzzing to get up steam, launches himself heavily on the air and goes away in grand style.

hugh miller, in his autobiography, tells of the discovery he made of a curiously striking resemblance in shape between our most elegantly made carriages and the bodies of wasps, the resemblance being {71} heightened by a similarity of colouring seen in the lines and bands of vivid yellows and reds on a polished black ground. this likeness between insect and carriage does not appear so striking at this day owing to a change in the fashion towards a more sombre colour in the vehicles; their funeral blacks, dark blues, and greens being now seldom relieved with bright yellows and reds. the stag-beetle, too, when he goes away with heavy flight always gives one the idea of some kind of machine or vehicle, not like the aerial phaeton of the wasp or hornet, with its graceful lines and strongly-contrasted colours, but an oblong, ponderous, armour-plated car, furnished with a beak, and painted a deep uniform brown.

birds, especially the more aerial insectivorous kinds, have the habit of flying at and teasing any odd or grotesque-looking creature they may see on the wing—as a bat, for instance. i have seen small birds dart at a passing stag, but on coming near they turn tail and fly from him, frightened perhaps at his formidable appearance and loud noise.

notwithstanding his lumbering, blundering ways, when the stag is abroad in search of the doe, you may see that he is endowed with a sense and faculty so exquisite as to make it appear almost miraculous in the sureness of its action. the void air, as he sweeps droning through it, is peopled with subtle intelligences, which elude and mock and fly from him, and which he pursues until he finds out their secret. they mock him most, or, to drop the metaphor, he is most at fault, on a still sultry day when {72} not a breath of air is stirring. at times he catches what, for want of better knowledge, we must call a scent, and in order to fix the direction it comes from he goes through a series of curious movements. you will see him rise above a thorny thicket, or a point where two hedges intersect at right angles, and remain suspended on his wings a few inches above the hedge-top for one or two minutes, loudly humming, and turning by a succession of jerks all round, pausing after each turn, until he has faced all points of the compass.

this failing, he darts away and circles widely round, then returning to the central point suspends himself as before. after spending several minutes in this manner, he once more resumes his wanderings. several males are sometimes attracted to the same spot, but they pass and repass without noticing one another. you will see as many as three or four or half a dozen majestically moving up and down at a hedge-side or in a narrow path in a hazel copse, each beetle turning when he gets to the end and marching back again; and altogether their measured, stately, and noisy movements are a fine spectacle.

a slight wind makes a great difference to him: even a current of air so faint as not to be felt on the face will reveal to him the exact distant spot in which the doe is lurking. the following incident will serve to show how perfect and almost infallible the sense and its correlated instinct are, and at the same time what a clumsy, blundering creature this beetle is.

seeking a mate

hearing a buzzing noise in a large unkept hedge, {73} i went to the spot and found a stag trying to extricate himself from some soft fern-fronds growing among the brambles in which he had got entangled. in the end he succeeded, and, finally gaining a point where there was nothing to obstruct his flight, he launched himself on the air and flew straight away to a distance of fifty yards; then he turned and commenced flying backwards and forwards, travelling forty or fifty yards one way and as many the other, until he made a discovery; and struck motionless in his career, he remained suspended for a moment or two, then flew swiftly and straight as a bullet back to the hedge from which he had so recently got away. he struck the hedge where it was broadest, at a distance of about twenty yards or more from the point where i had first found him, and running to the spot, i saw that he had actually alighted within four or five inches of a female concealed among the clustering leaves. on his approaching her she coyly moved from him, climbing up and down and along the branchlets, but for some time he continued very near her. so far he had followed on her track, or by the same branches and twigs over which she had passed, but on her getting a little farther away and doubling back, he attempted to reach her by a series of short cuts, over the little bridges formed by innumerable slender branches, and his short cuts in most cases brought him against some obstruction; or else there was a sudden bend in the branch, and he was taken farther away. when he had a chain of bridges or turnings, he seemed fated to take the wrong one, {74} and in spite of all his desperate striving to get nearer, he only increased the distance between them. the level sun shone into the huge tangle of bramble, briar, and thorn, with its hundreds of interlacing branches and stringy stems, so that i was able to keep both beetles in sight; but after i had watched them for three-quarters of an hour, the sun departed, and i too left them. they were then nearly six feet apart; and seeing what a labyrinth they were in, i concluded that, strive how the enamoured creature might, they would never, from the stag-beetle point of view, be within measurable distance of one another.

something in the appearance of the big beetle, both flying and when seen on the ground in his wrathful, challenging attitude, strikes the rustics of these parts as irresistibly comic. when its heavy flight brings it near the labourer in the fields, he knocks it down with his cap, then grins at the sight of the maltreated creature's amazement and indignation. however weary the ploughman may be when he plods his homeward way, he will not be too tired to indulge in this ancient practical joke. when the beetle's flight takes him by village or hamlet, the children, playing together in the road, occupied with some such simple pastime as rolling in the dust or making little miniature hills of loose sand, are suddenly thrown into a state of wild excitement, and, starting to their feet, they run whooping after the wanderer, throwing their caps to bring him down.

a stag-beetle's fate

one evening at sunset, on coming to a forest gate {75} through which i had to pass, i saw a stag-beetle standing in his usual statuesque, angry or threatening attitude in the middle of the road close to the gate. doubtless some labourer who had arrived at the gate earlier in the evening had struck it down for fun and left it there. by-and-by, i thought, he will recover from the shock to his dignity and make his way to some elevated point, from which he will be able to start afresh on his wanderings in search of a wife. but it was not to be as i thought, for next morning, on going by the same gate, i found the remains of my beetle just where i had last seen him—the legs, wing-cases, and the big, broad head with horns attached. the poor thing had remained motionless too long, and had been found during the evening by a hedgehog and devoured, all but the uneatable parts. on looking closely, i found that the head was still alive; at a touch the antenn?—those mysterious jointed rods, toothed like a comb at their ends—began to wave up and down, and the horns opened wide, like the jaws of an angry crab. on placing a finger between them they nipped it as sharply as if the creature had been whole and uninjured. yet the body had been long devoured and digested; and there was only this fragment left, and, torn off with it, shall we say? a fragment of intelligent life!

we always look on this divisibility of the life-principle in some creatures with a peculiar repugnance; and, like all phenomena that seem to contradict the regular course of nature, it gives a {76} shock to the mind. we do not experience this feeling with regard to plant life, and to the life of some of the lower animal organisms, because we are more familiar with the sight in these cases. the trouble to the mind is in the case of the higher life of sentient and intelligent beings that have passions like our own. we see it even in some vertebrates, especially in serpents, which are most tenacious of life. thus, there is a recorded case of a pit viper, the head of which was severed from the body by the person who found it. when the head was approached the jaws opened and closed with a vicious snap, and when the headless trunk was touched it instantly recoiled and struck at the touching object.

tenacity of life

such cases are apt to produce in some minds a sense as of something unfamiliar and uncanny behind nature that mocks us. but even those who are entirely free from any such animistic feeling are strangely disturbed at the spectacle, not only because it is opposed to the order of nature (as the mind apprehends it), but also because it contradicts the old fixed eternal idea we all have, that life is compounded of two things—the material body and the immaterial spirit, which leavens and, in a sense, re-creates and shines in and through the clay it is mixed with; and that you cannot destroy the body without also destroying or driving out that mysterious, subtle principle. life was thus anciently likened to a seal, which is two things in one—the wax and the impression on it. you cannot break the seal without also destroying the impression, any more than you can {77} break a pitcher without spilling the liquor in it. in such cases as those of the beetle and the serpent, it would perhaps be better to liken life to a red, glowing ember, which may be broken into pieces, and each piece still burn and glow with its own portion of the original heat.

the survival after death of something commonly supposed to be dependent on vitality is another phenomenon which, like that of the divisibility of the life-principle, affects us disagreeably. the continued growth of the hair of dead men is an instance in point. it is, we know, an error, caused by the shrinking of the flesh; and as for the accounts of coffins being found full of hair when opened, they are inventions, though still believed in by some persons. another instance, which is not a fable, is that of a serpent's skin. when properly and quickly dried after removal, it will retain its bright colours for an indefinite time—in some cases for many years. but at intervals the colours appear to fade, or become covered with a misty whiteness; and the cause, as one may see when the skin is rubbed or shaken, is that the outer scales are being shed. they come off separately, and are very much thinner than when the living serpent sheds his skin, and they grow thinner with successive sheddings until they are scarcely visible. but at each shedding the skin recovers its brightness. one in my possession continued shedding its scale-films in this way for about ten years. i used it for a book-marker and often had it in my hands, but not until it ceased shedding its {78} scale-coverings, and its original bright green colour turned to dull blackish-green, did i get rid of the feeling that it had some life in it.

but the most striking instance of the continuance or survival long after death of what has seemed an attribute or manifestation of life remains to be told.

a dead glow-worm's light

one cloudy, very dark night at boldre, i was going home across a heath with some girls from a farmhouse where we had been visiting, when one of my young companions cried out that she could see a spark of fire on the road before us. we then all saw it—a small, steady, green light—but on lighting a match and looking closely at the spot, nothing could we see except the loose soil in the road. when the match went out the spark of green fire was there still, and we searched again, turning the loose soil with our fingers until we discovered the dried and shrunken remains of a glow-worm of the previous year. it had been trodden into the sand, and the sand driven into it, until it was hard to make out any glow-worm shape or appearance in it. it was like a fragment of dry earth, and yet, so long as it was in the dark, the small, brilliant green light continued to shine from one end of it. yet this dried old case must have been dead and blown about in the dust for at least seven or eight months.

on going up to london i carried it with me in a small box: there in a dark room it shone once more, but the light was now much fainter, and on the following evening there was no light. for some days i tried, by moistening it, by putting it out {79} in the sun and wind, and in other ways, to bring back the light, but did not succeed; and, convinced at length that it would shine no more, i had the feeling that life had at last gone out of that dry, dusty fragment.

the little summer tragedies in nature which we see or notice are very few—not one in a thousand of those that actually take place about us in a spot like this, teeming with midsummer life. a second one, which impressed me at the time, had for its scene a spot not more than eight minutes' walk from that forest gate where the stag-beetle, too long in cooling his wrath, had been overtaken by so curious a destiny. but before i relate this other tragedy, i must describe the place and some of the creatures i met there. it was a point where heath and wood meet, but do not mingle; where the marshy stream that drains the heath flows down into the wood, and the boggy ground sloping to the water is overgrown with a mixture of plants of different habits—lovers of a dry soil and of a wet—heather and furze, coarse and fine grasses, bracken and bog myrtle; and in the wettest spots there were patches and round masses of rust-red and orange-yellow and pale-grey lichen, and a few fragrant, shining, yellow stars of the bog asphodel, although its flowering season was nearly over. it was a perfect wilderness, as wild a bit of desert as one could wish to be in, where a man could spy all day upon its shy inhabitants, and no one would come and spy upon him.

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here, if anywhere, was my exulting thought when i first beheld it, there should be adders for me. there was a snakiness in the very look of the place, and i could almost feel by anticipation the delightful thrill in my nerves invariably experienced at the sight of a serpent. and as i went very cautiously along, wishing for the eyes of a dragon-fly so as to be able to see all round me, a coil of black and yellow caught my sight at a distance of a few yards ahead, and was no sooner seen than gone. the spot from which the shy creature had vanished was a small, circular, natural platform on the edge of the bank, surrounded with grass and herbage, and a little dwarf, ragged furze; the platform was composed of old, dead bracken and dry grass, and had a smooth, flat surface, pressed down as if some creature used it as a sleeping-place. it was, i saw, the favourite sleeping- or basking-place of an adder, and by-and-by, or in a few hours' time, i should be able to get a good view of the creature. later in the day, on going back to the spot, i did find my adder on its platform, and was able to get within three or four yards, and watch it for some minutes before it slipped gently down the bank and out of sight.

watching adders

this adder was a very large (probably gravid) female, very bright in the sunshine, the broad, zig-zag band an inky black on a straw-coloured ground. on my third successful visit to the spot i was agreeably surprised to find that my adder had not been widowed by some fatal accident, nor left by her wandering mate to spend the summer alone; for {81} now there were two on the one platform, slumbering peacefully side by side. the new-comer, the male, was a couple of inches shorter and a good deal slimmer than his mate, and differed in colour; the zigzag mark was intensely black, as in the other, but the ground colour was a beautiful copper red; he was, i think, the handsomest red adder i have seen.

on my subsequent visits to the spot i found sometimes one and sometimes both; and i observed them a good deal at different distances. one way was to look at them from a distance of fifteen to twenty yards through a binocular magnifying nine diameters, which produced in me the fascinating illusion of being in the presence of venomous serpents of a nobler size than we have in this country. the glasses were for pleasure only. when i watched them for profit with my unaided eyes, i found it most convenient to stand at a distance of three or four yards; but often i moved cautiously up to the raised platform they reposed on, until, by bending a little forward, i could look directly down upon them.

when we first catch sight of an adder lying at rest in the sun, it strikes us as being fast asleep, so motionless is it; but that it ever does really sleep with the sun shining into its round, lidless, brilliant eyes is hardly to be believed. the immobility which we note at first does not continue long; watch the adder lying peacefully in the sun, and you will see that at intervals of a very few minutes, and sometimes as often as once a minute, he quietly changes his position. now he draws his concentric coils a little closer, {82} now spreads them more abroad; by-and-by the whole body is extended to a sinuous band, then disposed in the form of a letter s, or a simple horseshoe figure, and sometimes the head rests on the body and sometimes on the ground. the gentle, languid movements of the creature changing his position at intervals are like those of a person reclining in a hot bath, who occasionally moves his body and limbs to renew and get the full benefit of the luxurious sensation.

that the two adders could see me when i stood over them, or at a distance of three or four yards, or even more, is likely; but it is certain that they did not regard me as a living thing, or anything to be disturbed at, but saw me only as a perfectly motionless object which had grown imperceptibly on their vision, and was no more than a bush, or stump, or tree. nevertheless, i became convinced that always after standing for a time near them my presence produced a disturbing effect. it is, perhaps, the case that we are not all contained within our visible bodies, but have our own atmosphere about us—something of us which is outside of us, and may affect other creatures. more than that, there may be a subtle current which goes out and directly affects any creature (or person) which we regard for any length of time with concentrated attention. this is one of the things about which we know nothing, or, at all events, learn nothing from our masters, and most scientists would say that it is a mere fancy; but in this instance it was plain to see that always after a time something began to produce a disturbing effect {83} on the adders. this would first show itself in a slight restlessness, a movement of the body as if it had been breathed upon, increasing until they would be ill at ease all the time, and at length they would slip quietly away to hide under the bank.

the following incident will show that they were not disturbed at seeing me standing near, assuming that they could or did see me. on one of my visits i took some pieces of scarlet ribbon to find out by an experiment if there was any truth in the old belief that the sight of scarlet will excite this serpent to anger. i approached them in the usual cautious way, until i was able, bending forward, to look down upon them reposing unalarmed on their bed of dry fern; then, gradually putting one hand out until it was over them, i dropped from it first one then another piece of silk so that they fell gently upon the edge of the platform. the adders must have seen these bright objects so close to them, yet they did not suddenly draw back their heads, nor exsert their tongues, nor make the least movement, but it was as if a dry, light, dead leaf, or a ball of thistledown, had floated down and settled near them, and they had not heeded it.

in the same way they probably saw me, and it was as if they had seen me not, since they did not heed my motionless figure; but that they always felt my presence after a time i felt convinced, for not only when i stood close to and looked down upon them, but also at a distance of four to eight yards, after gazing fixedly at them for some minutes, {84} the change, the tremor, would appear, and in a little while they would steal away.

enough has been said to show how much i liked the company of these adders, even when i knew that my presence disturbed their placid lives in some indefinable way. they were indeed more to me than all the other adders, numbering about a score, which i had found at their favourite basking-places in the neighbourhood. for they were often to be found in that fragrant, sequestered spot where their home was; and they were two together, of different types, both beautiful, and by observing them day by day i increased my knowledge of their kind. we do not know very much about "the life and conversation" of adders, having been too much occupied in "bruising" their shining beautiful bodies beneath our ironshod heels, and with sticks and stones, to attend to such matters. so absorbed was i in contemplating or else thinking about them at that spot that i was curiously indifferent to the other creatures—little lizards, and butterflies, and many young birds brought by their parents to the willows and alders that shaded the stream. all day the birds dozed on their gently swaying perches, chirping at intervals to be fed; and near by a tree-pipit had his stand, and sang and sang when most songsters were silent, but i paid no attention even to his sweet strains. two or three hundred yards away, up the stream on a boggy spot, a pair of pewits had their breeding-place. they were always there, and invariably on my appearance they rose up and {85} came to me, and, winnowing the air over my head, screamed their loudest. but i took no notice, and was not annoyed, knowing that their most piercing cries would have no effect on the adders, since their deaf ears heard nothing, and their brilliant eyes saw next to nothing, of all that was going on about them. after vexing their hearts in vain for a few minutes the pewits would go back to their own ground, then peace would reign once more.

a dead young pewit

one day i was surprised and a little vexed to find that the pewits had left their own ground to come and establish themselves on the bog within forty yards of the spot where i was accustomed to take my stand when observing the adders. their anxiety at my presence had now become so intensified that it was painful to witness. i concluded that they had led their nearly grown-up young to that spot, and sincerely hoped that they would be gone on the morrow. but they remained there five days; and as their solicitude and frantic efforts to drive me away were renewed on each visit, they were a source of considerable annoyance. on the fourth day i accidentally discovered their secret. if i had not been so taken up with the adders, i might have guessed it. going over the ground i came upon a dead full-grown young pewit, raised a few inches above the earth by the heather it rested on, its head dropped forward, its motionless wings partly open.

usually at the moment of death a bird beats violently with its wings, and after death the wings remain half open. this was how the pewit had died, {86} the wings half folded. picking it up, i saw that it had been dead several days, though the carrion beetles had not attacked it, owing to its being several inches above the ground. it had, in fact, no doubt been already dead when i first found the old pewits settled at that spot; yet during those four hot, long summer days they had been in a state of the most intense anxiety for the safety of these dead remains! this is to my mind not only a very pathetic spectacle, but one of the strangest facts in animal life. the reader may say that it is not at all strange, since it is very common. it is most strange to me because it is very common, since if it were rare we could say that it was due to individual aberration, or resulted through the bluntness of some sense or instinct. what is wonderful and almost incredible is that the higher vertebrates have no instinct to guide them in such a case as i have described, and no inherited knowledge of death. to make of nature a person, we may see that in spite of her providential care for all her children, and wise ordering of their lives down to the minutest detail, she has yet failed in this one thing. her only provision is that the dead shall be speedily devoured; but they are not thus removed in numberless instances; a very familiar one is the sight of living and dead young birds, the dead often in a state of decay, lying together in one nest: and here we cannot but see that the dead become a burden and a danger to the living. birds and mammals are alike in this. they will call, and wait for, and bring food to, and try to rouse the dead {87} young or mate; day and night they will keep guard over it and waste themselves in fighting to save it from their enemies. yet we can readily believe that an instinct fitted to save an animal from all this vain excitement, and labour, and danger, would be of infinite advantage to the species that possessed it.

animals and their dead

in some social hymenopterous insects we see that the dead are removed; it would be impossible for ants to exist in communities numbering many thousands and tens of thousands of members crowded in a small space without such a provision. the dead ant is picked up by the first worker that happens to come that way and discovers it, and carried out and thrown away. probably some chemical change which takes place in the organism on the cessation of life and makes it offensive to the living has given rise to this healthy instinct. the dead ant is not indeed seen as a dead fellow-being, but as so much rubbish, or "matter in the wrong place," and is accordingly removed. we can confidently say that this is not a knowledge of death, from what has been observed of the behaviour of ants on the death of some highly regarded individual in the nest—a queen, for instance. on this point i will quote a passage from the rev. william gould's account of english ants, dated 1747. his small book may be regarded as a classic, at all events by naturalists; albeit the editors of our dictionary of national biography have not thought proper to give him a place in that work, in which so many obscurities, especially of the nineteenth century, have had their little lives recorded.

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it may be remarked in passing that the passage to be quoted is a very good sample of the style of our oldest entomologist, the first man in england to observe the habits of insects. his small volume dates many years before the natural history of selborne, and his style, it will be seen, is very different from that of gilbert white. we know from lord avebury's valuable book on the habits of ants that gould was not mistaken in these remarkable observations.

in whatever apartment a queen ant condescends to be present, she commands obedience and respect. an universal gladness spreads itself through the whole cell, which is expressed by particular acts of joy and exultation. they have a peculiar way of skipping, leaping, and standing upon their hind legs, and prancing with the others. these frolicks they make use of, both to congratulate each other when they meet, and to show their regard for the queen.... howsoever romantick this description may appear, it may easily be proved by an obvious experiment. if you place a queen ant with her retinue under a glass, you will in a few moments be convinced of the honour they pay, and esteem they entertain for her. there cannot be a more remarkable instance than what happened to a black queen, the beginning of last spring. i had placed her with a large retinue in a sliding box, in the cover of which was an opening sufficient for the workers to pass to and fro, but so narrow as to confine the queen. a corps was constantly in waiting and surrounded her, whilst others went out in search of provisions. by some misfortune she died; the ants, as if not apprised of her death, continued their obedience. they even removed her from one part of the box to another, and treated her with the same court and formality as if she had been alive. this lasted two months, at the end of which, the cover being open, they forsook the box, and carried her off.

two days after i found the dead pewit the parent birds disappeared; and a little later i paid my last visit to the adders, and left them with the greatest reluctance, for they had not told me a hundredth part of their unwritten history.