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As to its mode of attack, M. Jonnès says that when it throws itself on its victim it clings to it by the double hooks of its tarsi, and strives to reach the back of the head, to insert its jaws between the skull and the vertebræ. SHUCKARD in the Ann. and Mag. of Nat.
We may imagine that the early progenitor of the ostrich had habits like those of a bustard, and that as natural selection increased in successive generations the size and weight of its body, its legs were used more, and its wings less, until they became incapable of flight. In the Onites apelles the tarsi are so habitually lost, that the insect has been described as not having them.
If she frees her hinder tarsi she remains snared by the front tarsi and has to begin all over again. I was doubting the possibility of her escape when, after a good quarter of an hour's struggle, she succeeded in extricating herself. But, where the Gad-fly has got off, the Midge remains. The winged Aphis also remains, the Ant, the Mosquito and many another of the smaller insects.
Those on the way to the nest carry tiny pellets of mortar, the size of small shot; those who return at once settle on the driest and hardest spots. Their whole body aquiver, they scrape with the tips of their mandibles and rake with their front tarsi to extract atoms of earth and grains of sand, which, rolled between their teeth, become impregnated with saliva and form a solid mass.
The most frequent length of time averages twenty minutes. If nothing disturbs the Beetle, if I cover him with a glass shade, protecting him from the Flies, who are importunate visitors in the hot weather prevailing at the time of my experiment, the inertia is complete: not a quiver of the tarsi, nor of the palpi, nor of the antennæ. Here indeed is a simulacrum of death, with all its inertia.
Moreover, I am careful to arrange the feathers, to smooth them with a hair pencil, so that the bird looks quite smart and has every appearance of being untouched. The fly is soon there. She inspects the linnet from end to end; with her front tarsi she fumbles at the breast and belly. It is a sort of auscultation by sense of touch.
'Having finished his meal, he nearly always made his toilet, which consisted in brushing his palpi and mandibles, both inside and out, with his front tarsi. After that, he resumed his air of motionless gravity. The evening and the night were his time for taking his walks abroad. I often heard him scratching the paper of the bag.
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.
For three weeks on end, I see repeated in all its details the spectacle to which I have been accustomed in the victims extracted from the burrows or taken from the huntress: the wide-open mandibles, the quivering palpi and tarsi, the ovipositor shuddering convulsively, the abdomen throbbing at long intervals, the spark of life rekindled at the touch of a pencil.
For a long time the body is repeatedly shaken, but in vain; the tibiae or tarsi, unduly hard, refuse to yield to the patient saw. Sparrows and Mice grow dry and shrivelled, unused, upon the gibbet. Sooner in one case, later in another, my Necrophori abandon the insoluble problem in mechanics: to push, ever so little, the movable support and so to unhook the coveted carcass.
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