sufficient
reason.

It is tiresome that the diet of the Aramon Meloid is not known. If I
allowed myself to be guided by analogy, I should be inclined to regard
Schreber's Cerocoma as a parasite of _Tachytes tarsina_, who buries
her hoards of young Locusts in the high sandy banks. In that case, the
two Cerocomae would have a similar diet. But I leave it to Dr.
Beauregard to elucidate this important characteristic.

The riddle is deciphered: the Meloid that eats Praying Mantes is
Schaeffer's Cerocoma, of whom I find plenty, in the spring, on the
blossoms of the everlasting. Whenever I see it, my attention is
attracted by an unusual peculiarity: the great difference of size that
is able to exist between one specimen and another, albeit of the same
sex. I see stunted creatures, females as well as males, which are
barely one third the length of their better-developed companions. The
Twelve-spotted Mylabris and the Four-spotted Mylabris present
differences quite as pronounced in this respect.

The cause which makes a dwarf or a giant of the same insect,
irrespective of its sex, can be only the smaller or greater quantity
of food. If the larva, as I suspect, is obliged to find the Tachytes'
game-larder for itself and to visit a second and a third, when the
first is too frugally furnished, it may be imagined that the hazard of
the road does not favour all in the same way, but rather allots
abundance to one and penury to another. The grub that does not eat its
fill remains small, while the one that gluts itself grows fat. These
differences of size, in themselves, betray parasitism. If a mother's
pains had amassed the food, or if the family had had the industry to
obtain it direct instead of robbing others, the ration would be
practically equal for all; and the inequalities in size would be
reduced to those which often occur between the two sexes.

They speak, moreover, of a precarious, risky parasitism, wherein the
Meloid is not sure of finding its food, which the Sitaris finds so
deftly, getting itself carried by the Anthophora, after being born at
the very entrance to the Bee's galleries and leaving its retreat only
to slip into its host's fleece. A vagabond obliged to find for itself
the food that suits it, the Cerocoma incurs the risk of Lenten fare.

One chapter is lacking to complete the history of Schaeffer's
Cerocoma: that which treats of the beginning, the laying of the eggs,
the egg itself and the primary larva.