SUICIDE OR HYPNOSIS?

The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. SUICIDE OR HYPNOSIS?

CHAPTER XV. SUICIDE OR HYPNOSIS?

You do not imitate the unfamiliar; you do not counterfeit a thing of which you know nothing: that is obvious. The simulation of death, therefore, implies a certain knowledge of death.

Well, has the insect, or rather, has any kind of animal, a presentiment that its life cannot last for ever? Does the perturbing problem of an end occur to its dense brain? I have associated a great deal with animals, I have lived on intimate terms with them and I have never observed anything to justify me in saying yes. The animal, with its humbler destiny, is spared that apprehension of the hour of death which constitutes at once our torment and our greatness.

Like the child still in the limbo of unconsciousness, it enjoys the present without taking thought of the future; free from the bitterness of a prospective ending, it lives in the blissful calm of ignorance. It is ours alone to foresee the briefness of our days; it is ours alone anxiously to question the grave regarding the last sleep.

Moreover, this glimpse of the inevitable destruction calls for a certain maturity of mind and, for that reason, is rather late in developing. I had a touching example of it this very week.

A pretty little Kitten, the joy of all the household, after languidly dragging itself about for a couple of days, died in the night. Next morning the children found it lying stark in its basket. General affliction. Anna, especially, a little girl of four, considered with a pensive glance the little friend with which she had so often played. She petted it, called it, offered it a drop of milk in a cup:

"Kitty won't play," said the child. "She doesn't want my breakfast any more. She's asleep. I've never seen her sleep like this before. When will she wake up?"

This simplicity in the presence of death's harsh problem wrung my heart. Hastily I led the girl away from the sight and had the dead Kitten secretly buried. As, from this time onward, it no longer appeared by the table at meal-times, the grief-stricken child at last understood that she had seen her little friend sleeping the profound slumber that knows no awaking. For the first time a vague idea of death found its way into her mind.

Has the insect the signal honour of knowing what we do not know in our early childhood, at a time when thought is already manifesting itself, far superior, however feeble it be, to the dull understanding of the animal? Has it the power to foresee an ending, an attribute which in its case would be inconvenient and useless? Before deciding, let us consult, not the abstruse theories of science, a doubtful guide, but the Turkey, an eminently truthful one.

I recall one of the most vivid memories that remain to me from my brief sojourn at the Royal College of Rodez. So they called it then; to-day they call it a grammar-school; what improvement as the world grows older!

The thrice-blessed Thursday had come; our bit of translation was done, our dozen Greek roots had been learnt by heart; and we trooped down to the far end of the valley, so many bands of madcaps. With our trousers turned up to our knees, we exploited, artless fishermen that we were, the peaceful waters of the river, the Aveyron. What we hoped to catch was the Loach, no bigger than our little finger, but tempting, thanks to his immobility on the sand amid the waterweeds. We fully expected to transfix him with our trident, a fork.

This miraculous catch, the object of such shouts of triumph when it succeeded, was very rarely vouchsafed to us: the Loach, the rascal, saw the fork coming and with three strokes of his tail disappeared!

We found compensation in the apple-trees in the neighbouring pastures. The apple has from all time been the urchin's delight, above all when plucked from a tree which does not belong to him. Our pockets were soon crammed with the forbidden fruit.

Another distraction awaited us. Flocks of Turkeys were not rare, roaming at their own sweet will and gobbling up the Locusts around the farms. If no watcher hove in sight, we had great sport. Each of us would seize a Turkey, tuck her head under her wing, rock it in this attitude for a moment and then place her on the ground, lying on her side. The bird no longer budged. The whole flock of Turkeys was subjected to our hypnotic handling; and the meadow assumed the aspect of a battle-field strewn with the dead and dying.

And now look out for the farmer's wife! The loud gobbling of the harassed birds had told her of our wicked pranks. She would run up armed with a whip. But we had good legs in those days! And we had a good laugh too, behind the hedges, which favoured our retreat!

O delightful days when we put the Turkeys to sleep, can I recover the skill which I then possessed? To-day it is no longer the playful trick of a schoolboy; it is a matter of serious research. I happen to have the very subject that I need: a Turkey-hen, doomed soon to be the victim of our Christmas merry-making. I repeat with her the method of manipulation which I employed so successfully on the banks of the Aveyron. I tuck her head well under her wing and, molding it in this attitude with both hands, I rock the bird gently up and down for a couple of minutes.

The strange effect is produced; my childhood's manoeuvres obtained no better result. Laid on the ground, on her side and left to herself, my patient is a lifeless bundle. One would think her dead, if a slight rise and fall of the plumage did not reveal the breathing. She looks really like a dead bird which, in a last convulsion, had drawn its chilled feet, with their shrivelled toes, under its belly. The spectacle has a tragic air; and I feel overcome by a certain anxiety when I gaze upon the results of my evil spells. Poor Turkey! What if she were never to wake again!

We need not be afraid: she is waking; she stands up, staggering a little, it is true, with drooping tail and a shamefaced expression. That soon passes off; not a trace of it remains. In a few moments the bird is once more what it was before the experiment.

This torpor, the mean between true sleep and death, is of variable duration. When repeatedly provoked in my Turkey-hen, with suitable intervals of repose, immobility lasts sometimes for half an hour and sometimes for a few minutes. Here, as in the insect, it would be very difficult to analyse the causes of these differences. With the Guinea-fowl I succeed even better. The torpor lasts so long that I become alarmed by the bird's condition. The plumage reveals no trace of breathing. I ask myself, anxiously, whether the bird is not actually dead. I push it a little way along the ground with my foot. The patient does not stir. I do it again. And lo, the Guinea-fowl frees her head, stands up, regains her balance and scurries off! Her state of lethargy has lasted more than half an hour.

Now for the Goose. I have none. The gardener next door trusts me with his. She is brought to my house, which she fills with her trumpeting as she waddles about. Shortly afterwards there is absolute silence: the web-footed Amazon is lying on the ground, with her head tucked under her wing. Her immobility is as profound and as prolonged as that of the Turkey and the Guinea-fowl.

It is the Hen's turn now and the Duck's. They too succumb, but, so it seems to me, less persistently. Can it be that my hypnotic tricks are less efficacious with small birds than with large ones? To judge by the Pigeon, this may well be so. He yields to my art only to the extent of two minutes' sleep. A still smaller bird, a Greenfinch, is even more refractory: all that I obtain from him is a few seconds' drowsiness.

It would appear, then, that, in proportion as the activity is concentrated in a body of less volume, the torpor has less hold. The insect has already shown us this. The Giant Scarites does not stir for an hour, while the Smooth-skinned Scarites, a pigmy, wearies my persistence in turning him over; the large Cloudy Buprestis submits to my manoeuvres for a long period, whereas the Glittering Buprestis, a pigmy again, obstinately refuses to do so.

We will leave on one side, as insufficiently investigated, the influence of the bodily mass and remember only this fact, that it is possible, by a very simple artifice, to reduce a bird to a condition of apparent death. Do my Goose, my Turkey and the others resort to trickery with the object of deceiving their tormentor? It is certain that none of them thinks of shamming dead; they are actually immersed in a deep torpor; in a word, they are hypnotized.

These facts have long been known; they are perhaps the first in date in the science of hypnosis or artificial sleep. How did we, the little Rodez schoolboys, learn the secret of the Turkey's slumber? It was certainly not in our books. Coming from no one knows where, indestructible as everything that enters into children's games, it was handed down, from time immemorial, from one initiate to another.

Things are just the same to-day in my village of Sérignan, where there are numbers of youthful adepts in the art of putting poultry to sleep. Science often has very humble beginnings. There is nothing to tell us that the mischief of a pack of idle urchins is not the starting-point of our knowledge of hypnosis.

I have just been practising on insects tricks which to all appearances are as puerile as those which we practised on the Turkeys in the days when the farmer's wife used to run after us cracking her whip. Do not laugh: a serious problem looms behind this artlessness.

My insects' condition bears a strange resemblance to that of my poultry. Both present the image of death, inertia, the contraction of convulsed limbs. In both again the immobility is dispelled before its time by the agency of a stimulus, by sound in the case of the bird, by light in that of the insect. Silence, darkness and tranquillity prolong it. Its duration varies greatly in different species and appears to increase with corpulence.

Among ourselves, who are very unequal subjects for induced sleep, the hypnotist is obliged to pick and choose. He succeeds with one and not with another. Similarly, among the insects, a selection is necessary, for they do not all of them, by a long way, respond to the experimenter's attempts. My best subjects have been the Giant Scarites and the Cloudy Buprestis; but how many others have resisted quite indomitably, or remained motionless for only a few seconds!

The insect's return to the active state presents certain peculiarities which are well worthy of attention. The key to the problem lies here. Let us return for a moment to the patients who have been subjected to the ordeal of ether. These are really hypnotized. They do not remain motionless by way of a ruse, there is no doubt upon that point; they are actually on the threshold of death; and, if I did not take them in good time out of the flask in which a few drops of ether have been evaporated, they would never recover from the torpor whose last stage is death.

Now what symptoms herald their return to activity? We know the symptoms: the tarsi tremble, the palpi quiver, the antennæ wave to and fro. A man emerging from a deep sleep stretches his limbs, yawns and rubs his eyes. The insect awaking from the etheric sleep likewise has its own fashion of marking its recovery of consciousness: it flutters its tiny digits and the more mobile of its organs.

Let us now consider an insect which, upset by a shock, perturbed by some sort of excitement, is believed to be shamming dead, lying on its back. The return to activity is announced exactly in the same fashion and in the same order as after the stupefying effect of ether. First the tarsi quiver; then the palpi and antennæ wave feebly to and fro.

If the creature were really shamming, what need would it have of these minute preliminaries to the awakening? Once the danger has disappeared, or is deemed to have done so, why does the insect not swiftly get upon its feet, to make off as quickly as possible, instead of dallying with untimely pretences? I am quite sure that, once the Bear was gone, the comrade who had shammed dead under the animal's nose did not think of wasting time in stretching himself or rubbing his eyes. He jumped up at once and took to his heels.

And the insect is supposed to carry its cunning to the length of counterfeiting resuscitation down to the least details! No, no and again no; it would be madness. Those quiverings of the tarsi, those awakening movements of the palpi and antennæ are the obvious proof of a genuine torpor, now coming to an end, a torpor similar to that induced by ether but less intense; they show that the insect struck motionless by my artifice is not shamming dead, as the vulgar idiom has it and as the fashionable theories repeat. It is really hypnotized.

A shock which disturbs its nerve-centres, an abrupt fright which seizes upon it reduce it to a state of somnolence like that of the bird which is swung for a second or two with its head under its wing. A sudden terror sometimes deprives us human beings of the power of movement, sometimes kills us. Why should not the insect's organism, so delicate and subtle, give way beneath the grip of fear and momentarily succumb? If the emotion be slight, the insect shrinks into itself for an instant, quickly recovers and makes off; if it be profound, hypnosis supervenes, with its prolonged immobility.

The insect, which knows nothing of death and therefore cannot counterfeit it, knows nothing either of suicide, that desperate means of cutting short excessive misery. No authentic example has ever been given, to my knowledge, of an animal of any kind robbing itself of its own life. That those most richly endowed with the capacity of affection sometimes allow themselves to die of grief I grant you; but there is a great difference between this and stabbing one's self or cutting one's throat.

Yet the recollection occurs to me of the Scorpion's suicide, sworn to by some, denied by others. What truth is there in the story of the Scorpion who, surrounded by a circle of fire, puts an end to his suffering by stabbing himself with his poisoned sting? Let us see for ourselves:

Circumstances favour me. I am at this moment rearing, in large earthen pans, with a bed of sand and with potsherds for shelter, a hideous menagerie which hardly comes up to my expectations as regards the study of morals.1 I will profit by it in another way. It consists of some twenty-four specimens of Buthus occitanus, the large White Scorpion of the south of France. The odious animal abounds, always isolated, under the flat stones of the neighbouring hills, in the sandy spots which enjoy the most sunlight. It has a detestable reputation.

1 For the habits of the White or Languedocian Scorpion, cf. The Life and Love of the Insect: chaps. xvii. and xviii.—Translator's Note.

On the effects of its sting I personally have nothing to say, having always avoided, by a little caution, the danger to which my relations with the formidable captives in my study might have exposed me. Knowing nothing of it myself, I get people to tell me of it, wood-cutters in particular, who from time to time fall victims to their imprudence. One of them tells me the following story:

"After having my dinner, I was dozing for a moment among my faggots, when I was roused by a sharp pain. It was like the prick of a red-hot needle. I clapped my hand to the place. Sure enough, there was something moving! A Scorpion had crept under my trousers and stung me in the lower part of the calf. The ugly beast was full as long as my finger. Like that, sir, like that!"

And, adding gesture to speech, the worthy man extended his great fore-finger. This size did not surprise me: while insect-hunting, I have seen Scorpions as large.

"I wanted to go on with my work," he continued, "but I came out in a cold sweat; and my leg swelled up so you could see it swelling. It got as big as that, sir, as big as that."

More mimicry. Our friend spreads his two hands round his leg, at a distance, so as to denote the girth of a small barrel:

"Yes, like that, sir, like that; I had great trouble to get home, though it was only half a mile away. The swelling crept up and up. Next day it had got so high."

A gesture indicates the height.

"Yes, sir, for three days I couldn't stand up. I bore it as well as I could, with my leg stretched out on a chair. Soda-compresses did the trick; and there you are, sir, there you are."

Another woodcutter, he adds, was also stung in the lower part of the leg. He was binding faggots together at some distance and had not the strength to regain his home. He collapsed by the side of the road. Some men passing by carried him on their shoulders:

"À la cabro morto, moussu, à la cabro morto!"

The story of the rustic narrator, more versed in mimicry than in speech, does not seem to me exaggerated. A White Scorpion's sting is a very serious accident for a human being. When stung by his own kind, the Scorpion himself quickly succumbs. Here I have something better than the evidence of strangers: I have my own observations.

I take two healthy specimens from my menagerie and place them together at the bottom of a glass jar on a layer of sand. Excited with the tip of a straw which brings them face to face again whenever they draw back, the two harassed creatures decide on mortal combat. Each no doubt attributes to the other the annoyances of which I myself am the cause. The claws, those weapons of defence, are displayed in a semicircle and open to keep the adversary at a distance; the tails, in sudden jerks, are flung forward above the back; the poison-phials clash together; a tiny drop, limpid as water, beads the point of the sting.

The fight does not last long. One of the Scorpions receives the full force of the other's poisoned weapon. It is all over: in a few minutes the wounded one succumbs. The victor very calmly proceeds to gnaw the fore-part of the victim's cephalothorax, or, in less crabbed terms, the bit at which we look for a head and find only the entrance to a belly. The mouthfuls are small, but long-drawn-out. For four or five days, almost without a break, the cannibal nibbles at his murdered comrade. To eat the vanquished, that's good warfare, the only sort excusable. What I do not understand, nor shall until we tin the meat on the battle-field for food, is our wars between nations.

We now have authentic information: the Scorpion's sting is fatal, promptly fatal, to the Scorpion himself. Let us come to the matter of suicide, such as it has been described to us. When surrounded by a circle of live embers, the animal, so we are told, stabs itself with its sting and finds an end of its torment in voluntary death. This would be very fine on the creature's part if it were true. We shall see.

In the centre of a ring of burning charcoal, I place the largest specimen from my menagerie. The bellows increase the glow. At the first smart of the heat, the animal moves backwards within the circle of fire. It collides by inadvertence with the burning barrier. Now follows a disorderly retreat, in every direction, at random, renewing the agonizing contact. At each attempt to escape, the burning is repeated more severely than before. The animal becomes frantic. It darts forward and scorches itself. In a desperate frenzy, it brandishes its weapon, crooks it, straightens it, lays it down flat and raises it again, all with such disorderly haste that I am quite unable to follow its movements accurately.

The moment ought to have come for the Scorpion to release himself from his torture with a blow of the stiletto. And indeed, with a sudden spasm, the long-suffering creature becomes motionless, lies at full-length, flat upon the ground. There is not a movement; the inertia is complete. Is the Scorpion dead? It really looks like it. Perhaps he has pinked himself with a thrust of his sting that escaped me in the turmoil of the last efforts. If he has actually stabbed himself, if he has resorted to suicide, then he is dead beyond a doubt: we have just seen how quickly he succumbs to his own venom.

In my uncertainty, I pick up the apparently dead body with the tip of my forceps and lay it on a bed of cool sand. An hour later, the alleged corpse returns to life, as lusty as before the ordeal. I repeat the process with a second and third specimen. The results are the same. After the frantic plunges of the desperate victim, we have the same sudden inertia, with the creature sprawling flat as though struck by lightning, and the same return to life on the cool sand.

It seems probable that those who invented the story of the Scorpion committing suicide were deceived by this sudden swoon, this paralysing spasm, into which the high temperature of the enclosure throws the exasperated beast. Too quickly convinced, they left the victim to burn to death. Had they been less credulous and withdrawn the animal in good time from its circle of fire, they would have seen the apparently dead Scorpion return to life and thus assert its profound ignorance of suicide.

Apart from man, no living thing knows the last resource of a voluntary end, because none has a knowledge of death. As for us, to feel that we have the power to escape from the miseries of life is a noble prerogative, upon which it is good to meditate, as a sign of our elevation above the commonalty of the animal world; but in point of fact it becomes cowardice if from the possibility we pass to action.

He who proposes to go to that length should at least repeat to himself what Confucius, the great philosopher of the yellow race, said five-and-twenty centuries ago. Having surprised a stranger in the woods fixing to the branch of a tree a rope wherewith to hang himself, the Chinese sage addressed him in words the gist of which was as follows:

"However great your misfortunes, the greatest of all would be to yield to despair. All the rest can be repaired; this one is irreparable. Do not believe that all is lost for you and try to convince yourself of a truth which has been proved indisputable by the experience of the centuries. And that truth is this: so long as a man has life, there is no need for him to despair. He may pass from the greatest misery to the greatest joy, from the greatest misfortune to the highest felicity. Take courage and, as though you were this very day beginning to recognize the value of life, strive at every moment to make the most of it."

This humdrum Chinese philosophy is not without merit. It suggests the moralizing of the fabulist:

"... Qu'on me rende impotent,

Cul-de-jatte, goutteux, manchot, pourvu qu'en somme

Je vive, c'est assez: je suis plus que content."2

2 "... So powerless let me lie,

Gout-ridden, legless, armless; if only, after all,

I live, it is enough: more than content am I."

Yes, yes, La Fontaine and Kung the philosopher are right: life is a serious matter, which it will not do to throw away into the first bush by the roadside like a useless garment. We must look upon it not as a pleasure, nor yet as a punishment, but as a duty of which we have to acquit ourselves as well as we can until we are given leave to depart.

To anticipate this leave is cowardly and foolish. The power to disappear at will through death's trap-door does not justify us in deserting our post; but it opens to us certain vistas which are absolutely unknown to the animal.

We alone know how life's pageant closes, we alone can foresee our end, we alone profess devotion to the dead. Of these high matters none other has any suspicion. When would-be scientists proclaim aloud, when they declare that a wretched insect knows the trick of simulating death, we will ask them to look more closely and not to confound the hypnosis due to terror with the pretence of a condition unknown to the animal world.

Ours alone is the clear vision of an end, ours alone the glorious instinct of the beyond. Here, filling its modest part, speaks the voice of entomology, saying:

"Have confidence; never did an instinct fail to keep its promises."

About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books.

This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2009). The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27868/pg27868-images.html

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org, located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html.