The Sacred Beetle

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: They are very far, however, from any such cooperation. Each pushes the ball, with all his might, I admit, but he pushes as if he were alone and seems to have no notion of the happy result that would follow a combined effort. In this instance, when the ball is nailed to the ground by a pin, they do exactly...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: They are very far, however, from any such cooperation. Each pushes the ball, with all his might, I admit, but he pushes as if he were alone and seems to have no notion of the happy result that would follow a combined effort. In this instance, when the ball is nailed to the ground by a pin, they do exactly what they do in corresponding circumstances, as, for example, when the load is brought to a standstill by some obstacle, caught in a loop of couch-grass or transfixed by some spiky bit of stalk that has run into the soft, rolling mass. I produced artificially a stoppage which is not really very different from those occurring naturally when the ball is being rolled amid the thousand and one irregularities of the ground; and the Beetle behaves, in my experimental tests, as he would have behaved in any other circumstances in which I had no part. He uses his back as a wedge and a lever and pushes with his feet, without introducing anything new into his methods, even when he has a companion and can avail himself of his assistance. When he is all alone in face of the difficulty, when he has no assistant, his dynamic operations remain absolutely the same; and his efforts to move his transfixed ball end in success, provided that we give him the indispensable support of a platform, built up little by little. If we deny him this succour, then, no longer encouraged by the contact of his beloved ball, he loses heart and sooner or later flies away, doubtless with many regrets, and disappears. Where to? I do not know. What I do know is that he does not return with a gang of fellow- labourers whom he has begged to help him. What would he do with them, he who cannot make use of even one comrade? But perhaps my experiment, which leaves the ball suspended at an inaccessible height and the in...