ardent lovers, but cut a poor figure. Their linear dimensions
are barely half those of the other sex, which implies a volume only
one-eighth as great. At a short distance they appear to wear on their
heads a sort of gaudy turban. At close quarters this headgear is seen to
consist of the eyes, which are very large and a bright lemon-yellow and
which almost entirely surround the head.

At ten o'clock in the morning, when the heat begins to grow intolerable
to the observer, there is a continual coming and going between the
burrows and the tufts of grass, everlasting, thyme and wormwood, which
constitute the Tachytes' hunting-grounds within a moderate radius. The
journey is so short that the Wasp brings her game home on the wing,
usually in a single flight. She holds it by the fore-part, a very
judicious precaution, which is favourable to rapid stowage in the
warehouse, for then the Mantis' legs stretch backwards, along the axis
of the body, instead of folding and projecting sideways, when their
resistance would be difficult to overcome in a narrow gallery. The lanky
prey dangles beneath the huntress, all limp, lifeless and paralysed.
The Tachytes, still flying, alights on the threshold of the home and
immediately, contrary to the custom of Panzer's Tachytes, enters with
her prey trailing behind her. It is not unusual for a male to come upon
the scene at the moment of the mother's arrival. He is promptly snubbed.
This is the time for work, not for amusement. The rebuffed male
resumes his post as a watcher in the sun; and the housewife stows her
provisions.

But she does not always do so without hindrance. Let me recount one of
the misadventures of this work of storage. There is in the neighbourhood
of the burrows a plant which catches insects with glue. It is the Oporto
silene (S. portensis), a curious growth, a lover of the sea-side dunes,
which, though of Portuguese origin, as its name would seem to indicate,
ventures inland, even as far as my part of the country, where it
represents perhaps a survivor of the coastal flora of what was once a
Pliocene sea. The sea has disappeared; a few plants of its shores have
remained behind. This Silene carries in most of its internodes, in those
both of the branches and of the main stalk, a viscous ring, two- to
four-fifths of an inch wide, sharply delimited above and below. The
coating of glue is of a pale brown. Its stickiness is so great that the
least touch is enough to hold the