ocian Sphex (Cf. "Insect Life": chapter
10.--Translator's Note.) reduces her Ephippigers. For three weeks on
end, I see repeated in all its details the spectacle to which I have
been accustomed in the victims extracted from the burrows or taken from
the huntress: the wide-open mandibles, the quivering palpi and tarsi,
the ovipositor shuddering convulsively, the abdomen throbbing at long
intervals, the spark of life rekindled at the touch of a pencil. In
the fourth week, these signs of life, which have gradually weakened,
disappear, but the insect still remains irreproachably fresh. At last
a month passes; and the paralysed creature begins to turn brown. It is
over; death has come.

I have the same success with a Cricket and also with a Praying Mantis.
In all three cases, from the point of view of long-maintained freshness
and of the signs of life proved by slight movements, the resemblance
between my victim and those of the predatory insects is so great that no
Sphex and no Tachytes would have disowned the product of my devices. My
Cricket, my Ephippiger, my Mantis had the same freshness as theirs; they
preserved it as theirs did for a period amply sufficient to allow of
the grubs' complete evolution. They proved to me, in the most conclusive
manner, they prove to all whom it may interest, that the poison of the
Bees, leaving its hideous violence on one side, does not differ in its
effects from the poison of the predatory Wasps. Are they alkaline or
acid? The question is an idle one in this connection. Both of them
intoxicate, derange, torpify the nervous centres and thus produce either
death or paralysis, according to the method of inoculation. For the
moment, that is all. No one is yet able to say the last word on the
actions of those poisons, so terrible in infinitesimal doses. But on the
point under discussion we need no longer be ignorant: the Wasp owes the
preservation of her grub's provisions not to any special qualities of
her poison but to the extreme precision of her surgery.

A last and more plausible objection is that raised by Darwin when he
said that there were no fossil remains of instincts. And, if there were,
O master, what would they teach us? Not very much more than what we
learn from the instincts of to-day. Does not the geologist make the
erstwhile carcases live anew in our minds in the light of the world as
we see it? With nothing but analogy to guide them, he describes how
some saurian lived in t