So fragile and delicate does this creature appear that one can but wonder how it exists in the jungle of the grass. It has a disagreeable odor, it is said, and this is perhaps the reason that it holds its own, for it flies so slowly and is so conspicuous that it would otherwise fall a prey to every insectivorous bird and dragon-fly. Its other self is the Aphis Lion, a wingless but very active creature which hunts for plant lice and when it finds one punctures it with its mandibles, raises it in the air and lets the blood trickle down into its mouth. It sucks eggs, too, and, shameless creature that it is, it sucks those of its own species, or would, at least, if the mother instinct had not taught the winged females to lay their eggs on the ends of long, slender, stiff stems which the undiscriminating larvæ cannot climb, much as a human mother puts the pot of jam on the top shelf where the children cannot get it. [Illustration] THE WINGED ANT LION (_Myrmeleon immaculatus_, De G.) As with many of these monsters, it is the other self, the larva of the winged ant lion, which is the fascinating study. This winged form merely lays the egg from which hatches out the soft, spindle-shaped young with jaws like pincers. This little creature at once marks out a tiny circle in some dry, sandy place, and begins to dig a pitfall for its prey, the ants. By pitching the sand with its broad, flat head, just as a man who digs a well would pitch out shovelfuls of dirt, the young ant lion excavates a tiny crater in the sand and hides itself in the crater's pit with its pincers sticking upwards through the fine, loose sand. Any child who has jumped into his father's oat bin and tried to climb up the hillside of tumbling grain, knows how hard it is to get out. If he will imagine a hidden monster waiting with jaws opened at the bottom, he will have some sympathy for the unlucky ant which, slipping upon the rolling sand of the ant lion's crater slides slowly towards its pit--helped perhaps by dirt thrown on it by the ant lion. There seems to be no escape, and once within reach, the pincers close on it, and along their grooved inner faces, helped down by special tongue-like licking organs, the blood trickles and is guided to the mouth and thence into the stomach of the lion. And, curiously enough, this stomach is the only organ of digestion which the ant lion has. The stomach has no outlet and everything that is not digested must wait within it until the change of life brings on this winged state, when, like a tiny egg, the gathered excreta of the weeks and even months of feeding is thrown out from the body. Perhaps this strange structure of the beast has something to do with the fact that it can live six months at least without a particle of food. [Illustration] THE SCORPION FLY (_Panorpa confusa_, Westw.)