Since they have been definitely established by Fabre these curious facts have been well-known. They form perhaps the greatest prodigy presented by entomology, that science so full of marvels. These wasps nourish themselves only on the nectar of flowers; but their larvae, which they will never behold, must have fresh and succulent flesh still palpitating with life. The insect digs a tunnel in the soil, in which she places her eggs, and having provisioned the cell with selected game--cricket, spider, caterpillar, or beetle--she finally closes the entrance, which she does not again cross. Like nearly all insects, the young wasp is born in the larval state, and from the moment of its hatching to the end of its growth--that is to say, for a period of many days--the grub enclosed in its cell can look for no help from without. Here then is a fascinating problem: either the victims deposited by the mother are dead, and desiccation or putrefaction attacks them promptly, or else they are living, as indeed the larvae require; but then "what will become of this fragile creature, which a mere nothing will destroy, shut in the narrow chamber of the burrow among vigorous beetles, for weeks on end working their long spurred legs; or at grips with a monstrous caterpillar making play with its flanks and mandibles, rolling and unrolling its tortuous folds?" Such is the thrilling mystery of which Fabre discovered the key. With inconceivable ingenuity, the victim is seized and thrown to the ground, and the wasp plunges her sting, not at random into the body, which would involve the risk of death, but at determined points, exactly into the seat of those invisible nervous ganglions whose mechanism commands the various movements of the creature. Immediately after these subtle wounds the prey is paralysed throughout its body; its members appear to be disarticulated, "as though all the springs were broken"; the true corpse is not more motionless. But the wound is not mortal; not only does the insect continue to live, but it has acquired the strange prerogative of being able to live for a very long period without taking any nourishment, thanks precisely to the condition of immobility, in some sort vegetative, which paralysis confers upon it. When the hour strikes the hungry larva will find its favourite meat served to its liking; and it will attack this defenceless prey with all the circumspection of a refined eater; "with an exquisitely delicate art, nibbling the viscera of its victim little by little, with an infallible method; the less essential parts first of all, and only in the last instance those which are necessary to life. Here then is an incomprehensible spectacle; the spectacle of an animal which, eaten alive, mouthful by mouthful, during nearly a fortnight, is hollowed out, grows less and less, and finally collapses," while retaining to the end its succulence and its freshness.