the under side of the neck. The cricket
is unable to move and the conqueror's sting wanders over the horny
carapace seeking a joint, feeling for a soft place in which it can
enter to give the finishing stroke. The dart at last reaches, between
the head and the neck, the spot where the hard portions articulate,
leaving between them a space without covering. The joint in the armour
is found. The _Sphex's_ abdomen is agitated convulsively; the sting
penetrates the skin, piercing a ganglion situated just beneath this
point; the venom spreads and acts on the nervous cells, which can no
longer convey messages to the muscles. That is not all; the sting
wanders over the cricket's belly, this time seeking the joint between
the neck and the thorax; it finds it, and is again thrust in with
fury; a second ganglion of the nervous chain is thus perforated and
poisoned. After these two wounds the victim is completely paralysed.

As already mentioned, several facts enable us to recognise that the
Cricket is by no means dead. It is simply incapable of movement, as
would happen after an injection of curare. This poison kills a
superior animal, for it hinders the muscular movements of the chest
and diaphragm, necessary to respiration; but if a frog, which can
breathe through its skin, is thus acted on it comes to life again at
the end of twenty-four or forty-eight hours if the dose has not been
too strong. The cricket is in a similar condition; it neither eats nor
breathes; being incapable also of movement, there is no vital
expenditure; it remains in a sort of torpor, or latent life, awaiting
the tragic fate that is reserved for it. When it has been deposited in
the little mortuary chamber the _Sphex_ lays an egg on its thorax. The
larva will soon come out to penetrate the body of the prey by
enlarging the hole left by the sting. It thus finds for its first
meals a food which unites the flavour of living flesh with the
immobility of death. Nothing can be more convenient. When the first
body is eaten it proceeds to the second, and thus devours successively
the four victims stored up by maternal foresight.

In order not to interrupt the description and interfere with the
succession of the acts, I have passed without remark the experiment in
which Fabre substituted a living animal for the _Sphex's_ already
paralysed captive. It seems to me, however, that in this circumstance
the insect showed judgment, and knew how to act in accordance wi