banquets whereat the sister who has been worsted in the fight is
devoured. Such atrocities or here unknown.

Unknown also are tragic nuptials. The male is enterprising and
assiduous and is subjected to a long trial before succeeding. For days
and days he worries his mate, who ends by yielding. Due decorum is
preserved after the wedding. The feathered groom retires, respected by
his bride, and does his little bit of hunting, without danger of being
apprehended and gobbled up.

The two sexes live together in peace and mutual indifference until the
middle of July. Then the male, grown old and decrepit, takes counsel
with himself, hunts no more, becomes shaky in his walk, creeps down
from the lofty heights of the trellised dome and at last collapses on
the ground. His end comes by a natural death. And remember that the
other, the male of the Praying Mantis, ends in the stomach of his
gluttonous spouse.

The laying follows close upon the disappearance of the males.

One word more on comparative manners. The Mantis goes in for battle and
cannibalism; the Empusa is peaceable and respects her kind. To what
cause are these profound moral differences due, when the organic
structure is the same? Perhaps to the difference of diet. Frugality, in
fact, softens character, in animals as in men; gross feeding brutalizes
it. The gormandizer gorged with meat and strong drink, a fruitful
source of savage outbursts, could not possess the gentleness of the
ascetic who dips his bread into a cup of milk. The Mantis is that
gormandizer, the Empusa that ascetic.

Granted. But whence does the one derive her voracious appetite, the
other her temperate ways, when it would seem as though their almost
identical structure ought to produce an identity of needs? These
insects tell us, in their fashion, what many have already told us: that
propensities and aptitudes do not depend exclusively upon anatomy; high
above the physical laws that govern matter rise other laws that govern
instincts.

CHAPTER 4. THE CAPRICORN.

My youthful meditations owe some happy moments to Condillac's famous
statue which, when endowed with the sense of smell, inhales the scent
of a rose and out of that single impression creates a whole world of
ideas. (Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Abbe de Mureaux (1715-80), the
leading exponent of sensational philosophy. His most important work is
the "Traite des sensations," in which he imagines a statue, organized
like a man, an