f an appreciable shrinking in this breast
which, instead of milk, yields fat and blood. A week is hardly past
before the progress of the exhaustion becomes startlingly rapid. The
nurse is flabby and wrinkled, as though borne down by her own weight,
like a very slack object. If I move her from her place, she flops and
sprawls like a half-filled water bottle over the new supporting plane.
But the Anthrax' kiss goes on emptying her: soon she is but a sort of
shriveled lard bag, decreasing from hour to hour, from which the sucker
draws a few last oily drains. At length, between the twelfth and the
fifteenth day, all that remains of the larva of the mason bee is a white
granule, hardly as large as a pin's head.

This granule is the water bottle drained to the last drop, is the
nurse's breast emptied of all its contents. I soften the meager remnant
in water; then, keeping it still immersed, I blow into it through
an extremely attenuated glass tube. The skin fills out, distends and
resumes the shape of the larva, without there being an outlet anywhere
for the compressed air. It is intact, therefore; it is free of any
perforation, which would be forthwith revealed under the water by an
escape of gas. And so, under the Anthrax' cupping glass, the oily bottle
has been drained by a simple transpiration through the membrane; the
substance of the nurse grub has been transfused into the body of the
nursling by a process akin to that known in physics as endosmosis. What
should we say to a method of being suckled by the mere application of
the mouth to a teatless breast? What we see here may be compared with
that: without any outlet, the milk of the Chalicodoma grub passes into
the stomach of the Anthrax' larva.

Is it really an instance of endosmosis? Might it not rather be
atmospheric pressure that stimulates the flow of nourishing fluids and
distils them into the Anthrax' cup-shaped mouth, working, in order to
create a vacuum, almost like the suckers of the Cuttlefish? All this
is possible, but I shall refrain from deciding, preferring to assign a
large share to the unknown in this extraordinary method of nutrition.
It ought, I think, to provide physiologists with a field of research
in which new views on the hydrodynamics of live fluids might well be
gleaned; and this field trenches upon others that would also yield
rich harvests. The brief span of my days compels me to set the problem
without seeking to solve it.

And the secon