My curiosity was aroused, not only by such a rapid demise (for the impaling through the thorax is not usually an immediately fatal injury to an insect), but especially by some very strange and unnatural automatic movements of the victim--head protruding and turning from side to side; queer expansion of body, as though breathing; unusual lifting and other motions of legs, particularly of hind legs; the whole demonstration a mockery on life. The grasshopper was pinned to my drawing-board, and against a piece of newspaper. As I watched his strange antics, I suddenly discovered that he had become a veritable phantom of his former self; that I could actually _read the newspaper text through his body_. Examination now revealed the mystery. I could easily see every nook and cranny of the grasshopper's interior, so glassy were the walls of the body, and I could now count about a dozen small, white larvæ, which were now full grown, and were crawling about within through head, thorax, body, and hind legs, cleaning its walls of every particle of remaining tissue, and causing the singular motions described. Such a strange house-cleaning I never saw before. When the "Quaker" locust was captured it showed not the slightest sign of any such goings-on within its being. The final voracity of the larvæ was swift and terrible. And what an astonishing instinct is that which should teach these parasites to avoid the vitals of their insect host until the last moments of their own final, complete growth! The entire space of time from the activity of the grasshopper to the empty, transparent phantom was less than thirty minutes. I placed the unfortunate victim in a small, close box. Next morning he presented nothing but a clean, glassy shell, now more glassy than before, empty of every vestige of organic matter, while scattered about on the bottom of the box lay fifteen dark red, egg-shaped chrysalides of the escaped larvæ. Two weeks later, upon opening the box, a swarm of flies flew out. I was enabled to keep two of them. They were almost exactly like the common house-fly to the ordinary observer, but belonged to a distinct genus. At this writing, in the absence of my specimen, I cannot give the name by which they are known in learned circles, but I think I am safe in saying that they probably belong to the group called _Tachina_, a family of parasitic flies which spend their early lives in a similar questionable manner, to the probable discomfort of potato-bugs, caterpillars, and other accommodating insect hosts. I had seen similar flies emerging from my caterpillar boxes in my early entomological days without suspecting their significance, and any large collection of caterpillars in confinement is likely to include a victim. Riddles in Flowers