urished, and comfortably lodged, do not seem in any way
to suffer from nostalgia. They should behave there as they behave under
normal conditions.

Alas! the facts force me to reject the statement that the males have
time to escape; for I once surprised a male, apparently in the
performance of his vital functions, holding the female tightly
embraced--but he had no head, no neck, scarcely any thorax! The female,
her head turned over her shoulder, was peacefully browsing on the
remains of her lover! And the masculine remnant, firmly anchored,
continued its duty!

Love, it is said, is stronger than death! Taken literally, never has an
aphorism received a more striking confirmation. Here was a creature
decapitated, amputated as far as the middle of the thorax; a corpse
which still struggled to give life. It would not relax its hold until
the abdomen itself, the seat of the organs of procreation, was attacked.

The custom of eating the lover after the consummation of the nuptials,
of making a meal of the exhausted pigmy, who is henceforth good for
nothing, is not so difficult to understand, since insects can hardly be
accused of sentimentality; but to devour him during the act surpasses
anything that the most morbid mind could imagine. I have seen the thing
with my own eyes, and I have not yet recovered from my surprise.

Could this unfortunate creature have fled and saved himself, being thus
attacked in the performance of his functions? No. We must conclude that
the loves of the Mantis are fully as tragic, perhaps even more so, than
those of the spider. I do not deny that the limited area of the cage may
favour the massacre of the males; but the cause of such butchering must
be sought elsewhere. It is perhaps a reminiscence of the carboniferous
period when the insect world gradually took shape through prodigious
procreation. The Orthoptera, of which the Mantes form a branch, are the
first-born of the insect world.

Uncouth, incomplete in their transformation, they wandered amidst the
arborescent foliage, already flourishing when none of the insects sprung
of more complex forms of metamorphosis were as yet in existence: neither
butterflies, beetles, flies, nor bees. Manners were not gentle in those
epochs, which were full of the lust to destroy in order to produce; and
the Mantis, a feeble memory of those ancient ghosts, might well preserve
the customs of an earlier age. The utilisation of the males as food is a
custom