head slightly and bends itself into a hook. Then the skin splits
across the head and down the thorax. The tattered slough is thrust
back; and the pseudochrysalis appears in sight, absolutely naked. It
is white at first, as the larva was; but by degrees and fairly rapidly
it turns to the russet hue of virgin wax, with a brighter red at the
tips of the various tubercles which indicate the future legs and
mouth-parts. This shedding of the skin, which leaves the body of the
pseudochrysalis uncovered, recalls the mode of transformation observed
in the Oil-beetles and is different from that of the Sitares and the
Zonites, whose pseudochrysalis remains wholly enveloped in the skin of
the secondary larva, a sort of bag which is sometimes loose, sometimes
tight and always unbroken.

The mist that surrounded us at the outset is dispelled. This is indeed
a Meloid, a true Meloid, one of the strangest anomalies among the
parasites of its tribe. Instead of living on the honey of a Bee, it
feeds on the skewerful of Mantes provided by a Tachytes. The
North-American naturalists have taught us lately that honey is not
always the diet of the Blister-beetles: some Meloidae in the United
States devour the packets of eggs laid by the Grasshoppers. This is a
legitimate acquisition on their part, not an illegal seizure of the
food-stores of others. No one, as far as I am aware, had as yet
suspected the true parasitism of a carnivorous Meloid. It is
nevertheless very remarkable to find in the Blister-beetles, on both
sides of the Atlantic, this weakness for the flavour of Locust: one
devours her eggs; the other a representative of the order, in the
shape of the Praying Mantis and her kin.

Who will explain to me this predilection for the Orthopteron in a
tribe whose chief, the Oil-beetle, accepts nothing but the mess of
honey? Why do insects which appear close together in all our
classifications possess such opposite tastes? If they spring from a
common stock, how did the consumption of flesh supplant the
consumption of honey? How did the Lamb become a Wolf? This is the
great problem which was once set us, in an inverse form, by the
Spotted Sapyga, a honey-eating relative of the flesh-eating Scolia.[5]
I submit the question to whom it may concern.

[Footnote 5: The essays on these will appear in the volume, entitled
_The Hunting Wasps_, aforementioned.--_Translator's Note_.]

The following year, at the beginning of June, some of my
pseud