tation and feverish
excitement means that the great business of pairing is at hand. The
fact will escape no practised eye.

It is also what I particularly wish to observe. My wish is satisfied,
but not fully, for the late hours at which events take place did not
allow me to witness the final act of the wedding. It is late at night
or early in the morning that things happen.

The little that I see is confined to interminable preludes. Standing
face to face, with foreheads almost touching, the lovers feel and sound
each other for a long time with their limp antennae. They suggest two
fencers crossing and recrossing harmless foils. From time to time, the
male stridulates a little, gives a few short strokes of the bow and
then falls silent, feeling perhaps too much overcome to continue.
Eleven o'clock strikes; and the declaration is not yet over. Very
regretfully, but conquered by sleepiness, I quit the couple.

Next morning, early, the female carries, hanging at the bottom of her
ovipositor, a queer bladder-like arrangement, an opaline capsule, the
size of a large pea and roughly subdivided into a small number of
egg-shaped vesicles. When the insect walks, the thing scrapes along the
ground and becomes dirty with sticky grains of sand. The Grasshopper
then makes a banquet off this fertilizing capsule, drains it slowly of
its contents, and devours it bit by bit; for a long time she chews and
rechews the gummy morsel and ends by swallowing it all down. In less
than half a day, the milky burden has disappeared, consumed with zest
down to the last atom.

This inconceivable banquet must be imported, one would think, from
another planet, so far removed is it from earthly habits. What a
singular race are the Locustidae, one of the oldest in the animal
kingdom on dry land and, like the Scolopendra and the Cephalopod,
acting as a belated representative of the manners of antiquity!

CHAPTER 3. THE EMPUSA.

The sea, life's first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many
of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest
attempts of the animal kingdom; the land, less fruitful, but with more
capacity for progress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of
other days. The few that remain belong especially to the series of
primitive insects, insects exceedingly limited in their industrial
powers and subject to very summary metamorphoses, if to any at all. In
my district, in the front rank of those entom