The Osmiae "reply by a click of the jaws to the advances of their lovers, who recoil, and then, doubtless to make themselves more valiant, they also execute a ferocious mandibular grimace. With this byplay of the jaws and their menacing gestures of the head in the empty air the lovers have the air of intending to eat one another." Thus they preface their bridals by displays of gallantry, recalling the ancient betrothal customs of which Rabelais speaks; the pretenders were cuffed and derided and threatened with a hearty pummelling. (13/6.) On the arid hillsides, where the doubtful rays of the moon pierce the storm-clouds and illumine the sultry atmosphere, the pale scorpions, with short-sighted eyes, hideous monsters with misshapen heads, "display their strange faces, and two by two, hand in hand, stalk in measured paces amid the tufts of lavender. How tell their joys, their ecstasies, that no human language can express...!" (13/7.) However, the glow-worm, to guide the lover, lights its beacon "like a spark fallen from the full moon"; but "presently the light grows feebler, and fades to a discreet nightlight, while all around the host of nocturnal creatures, delayed in their affairs, murmur the general epithalamium." (13/8.) But their happy time is soon over; tragedy is about to follow idyll. One must live, and "the intestine rules the world." All creatures that fill the world are incessantly conflicting, and one lives only at the cost of another. On the other hand, in order that the coming generations may see the light, the present generations must think of the preservation of the young. "Perish all the rest provided the brood flourish!" And in the depth of burrows the future larvae who live only for their stomachs, "little ogres, greedy of living flesh," must have their prey. To hunger and maternity let us also add love, which "rules the world by conflict." Such are the components of the "struggle for existence," such as Fabre has described it, but with no other motive than to describe what he has observed and seen. Such are the ordinary themes of the grandiose battles which he has scattered through his narratives, and never did circus or arena offer more thrilling spectacles; no jungle ever hid more moving combats in its thickets." "Each has its ruses of war, its methods of attack, its methods of killing." What tactics--"studied, scientific, worthy of the athletes of the ancient palaestra"--are those which the Sphex employs to paralyse the Cricket and the Cerceris to capture the Cleona, to secure them in a suitable place, so as to operate on them more surely and at leisure! Beside these master paralysers, so expert in the art of dealing slow death, there are those which, with a precision no less scholarly, kill and wither their victims at a single stroke, and without leaving a trace: "true practitioners in crime."