The gibbet is oblique or vertical indifferently; but the Mole, always fixed by a hinder limb to the top of the twig, does not touch the soil; he hangs a few fingers'-breadths from the ground, out of the sextons' reach.
What will the latter do?
Will they scrape at the foot of the gibbet in order to overturn it?
By no means; and the ingenuous observer who looked for such tactics would be greatly disappointed.

No attention is paid to the base of the support.

It is not vouchsafed even a stroke of the rake.

Nothing is done to overturn it, nothing, absolutely nothing! It is by other methods that the Burying-beetles obtain the Mole.
These decisive experiments, repeated under many different forms, prove that never, never in this world do the Necrophori dig, or even give a superficial scrape, at the foot of the gallows, unless the hanging body touch the ground at that point.

And, in the latter case, if the twig should happen to fall, its fall is in nowise an intentional result, but a mere fortuitous effect of the burial already commenced.
What, then, did the owner of the Frog of whom Gledditsch tells us really see?
If his stick was overturned, the body placed to dry beyond the assaults of the Necrophori must certainly have touched the soil: a strange precaution against robbers and the damp! We may fittingly attribute more foresight to the preparer of dried Frogs and allow him to hang the creature some inches from the ground.