hich I find with a Scolia's egg upon their ventral
surface are distributed in the mould at random, without special
cavities, without any sign of some sort of structure. They are smothered
in the mould, just as are the larvae which have not been injured by the
Wasp. As my excavations in the Bois des Issards told me, the Scolia does
not prepare a lodging for her family; she knows nothing of the art of
cell-building. Her offspring occupies a fortuitous abode, on which the
mother expends no architectural pains. Whereas the other Hunting Wasps
prepare a dwelling to which the provisions are carried, sometimes from
a distance, the Scolia confines herself to digging her bed of leaf-mould
until she comes upon a Cetonia-larva. When she finds a quarry, she stabs
it on the spot, in order to immobilize it; and, again on the spot, she
lays an egg on the ventral surface of the paralysed creature. That is
all. The mother goes in quest of another prey without troubling further
about the egg which has just been laid. There is no effort of carting
or building. At the very spot where the Cetonia-grub is caught and
paralysed, the Scolia-larva hatches, grows and weaves its cocoon. The
establishment of the family is thus reduced to the simplest possible
expression.

CHAPTER 3. A DANGEROUS DIET.

The Scolia's egg is in no way exceptional in shape. It is white,
cylindrical, straight and about four millimetres long by one millimetre
thick. (About.156 x.039 inch.--Translator's Note.) It is fixed, by its
fore-end, upon the median line of the victim's abdomen, well to the rear
of the legs, near the beginning of the brown patch formed by the mass of
food under the skin.

I watch the hatching. The grub, still wearing upon its hinder parts the
delicate pellicle which it has just shed, is fixed to the spot to which
the egg itself adhered by its cephalic extremity. A striking spectacle,
that of the feeble creature, only this moment hatched, boring, for
its first mouthful, into the paunch of its enormous prey, which
lies stretched upon its back. The nascent tooth takes a day over the
difficult task. Next morning the skin has yielded; and I find the
new-born larva with its head plunged into a small, round, bleeding
wound.

In size the grub is the same as the egg, whose dimensions I have
just given. Now the Cetonia-larva, to meet the Scolia's requirements,
averages thirty millimetres in length by nine in thickness (1.17 x.35
inch.--Translator's No