He opens the enchanted alcoves wherein the puny grubs lie slumbering, "fat, rounded puppets"; the tender larvae which "gape and swing their heads to and fro" when the mother returns to the nest with her toothsome mouthful or her crop swollen with honey. What compassion, what tenderness, what sensitiveness in the affecting picture of the mother Halictus, abandoned, deprived of her offspring, bewildered and lost, when the terrible spring fly has destroyed her house: bald, emaciated, shabby, careworn, already dogged by the small grey lizard! (12/8.) The tragedy of the wasps' nest at the approach of the first chills of winter is the final fragment of an epic. At first there is a sort of uneasiness, "a species of indifference and anxiety which broods over the city"; already it has a presentiment of coming misfortune, of an approaching catastrophe. Presently a wild excitement ensues; the foster- mothers, "frightened, fierce, and restless," as though suddenly attacked by an incomprehensible insanity, conceive an aversion for the young; "the neuters extirpate the larvae and drag them out of the nest," and the drama of destruction draws to a close with "the final catastrophe; the infirm and the dying are dismembered, eviscerated, dissected in a heap in the catacombs by maggots, woodlice, and centipedes." Finally the moth comes upon the scene, its larvae "attacking the dwelling itself; gnawing and destroying the joists and rafters, until all is reduced to a few pinches of dust and shreds of grey paper." (12/9.) What picturesque expressions he employs to depict, by means of some significant feature, the striking peculiarities of the insect physiognomy! "The gipsy who night and day for seven months goes to and fro with her brats upon her back" is the Lycosa, the Tarantula with the black stomach, the great spider of the wastes. The larva of the great Capricornis, which gnaws the interior of old oak- trees, "leaving behind it, in the form of dry-rot, the refuse of its digestive processes," is "a scrap of intestine which eats its way as it goes." In "that hideous lout" the Scorpion he shows us a rough epitome of the shapeless head, the truncated face of the spider. The Tachinae, those "brazen diptera" which swarm on the sunny sand on the watch for Bembex or Philanthus, in order to establish their offspring at its expense, "are bandits clad in fustian, the head wrapped in a red handkerchief, awaiting the hour of attack!" The Languedocian Sphex, sprawling flat upon the vine leaves, grows dizzy with the heat and frisks for very pleasure; "with its feet it taps rapidly on its resting-place, and thus produces a drumming like that of a shower of rain falling thickly on the leaves." Fabre takes a keen delight in the production of these pictures, at once so exact and lifelike; but we must not therefore suppose that his mind is incapable of the detailed descriptions necessitated by the laborious processes of minute anatomy.