the selection of Weevils and
Buprestes, both of which are so strongly armoured.

But where the prey has only a soft skin, incapable of stopping the
sting, the concentrated nervous system is no longer necessary, for
the operator, versed in the anatomical secrets of her victim, knows to
perfection where the centres of innervation lie; and she wounds them
one after another, if need be from the first to the last. Thus do the
Ammophilae go to work when dealing with their caterpillars and the
Sphex-wasps when dealing with their Locusts, Ephippigers and Crickets.

With the Scoliae we come once again to a soft prey, with a skin
penetrable by the sting no matter where it be attacked. Will the tactics
of the caterpillar-hunters, who stab and stab again, be repeated here?
No, for the difficulty of movement under ground prohibits so complicated
an operation. Only the tactics of the paralysers of armour-clad insects
are practicable now, for, since there is but one thrust of the dagger,
the feat of surgery is reduced to its simplest terms, a necessary
consequence of the difficulties of an underground operation. The
Scoliae, then, whose destiny it is to hunt and paralyse under the soil
the victuals for their family, require a prey made highly vulnerable
by the close assemblage of the nerve-centres, as are the Weevils and
Buprestes of the Cerceres; and this is why it has fallen to their lot to
share among them the larvae of the Scarabaeidae.

Before they obtained their allotted portion, so closely restricted and
so judiciously selected; before they discovered the precise and almost
mathematical point at which the sting must enter to produce a sudden
and a lasting immobility; before they learnt how to consume, without
incurring the risk of putrefaction, so corpulent a prey: in brief,
before they combined these three conditions of success, what did the
Scoliae do?

The Darwinian school will reply that they were hesitating, essaying,
experimenting. A long series of blind gropings eventually hit upon the
most favourable combination, a combination henceforth to be perpetuated
by hereditary transmission. The skilful co-ordination between the end
and the means was originally the result of an accident.

Chance! A convenient refuge! I shrug my shoulders when I hear it invoked
to explain the genesis of an instinct so complex as that of the Scoliae.
In the beginning, you say, the creature gropes and feels its way; there
is nothing settled a