The fact is that the mother has taken care to deposit her egg "at a point always the same" in the region which her sting has rendered insensible, so that the first mouthfuls are only feebly resented. But as the enemy goes deeper and deeper "it sometimes happens that the cricket, bitten to the quick, attempts to retaliate; but it only succeeds in opening and closing the pincers of its mandibles on the empty air, or in uselessly waving its antennae." Vain efforts: "for now the voracious beast has bitten deep into the spot, and can with impunity ransack the entrails." What a slow and horrible agony for the paralysed victim, should some glimmer of consciousness still linger in its puny brain! What a terrible nightmare for the little field-cricket, suddenly plunged into the den of the Sphex, so far from the sunlit tuft of thyme which sheltered its retreat! To paralyse without killing, "to deliver the prey to the larvae inert but living": that is the end to be attained; only the method varies according to the species of the hunter and the structure of the prey; thus the Cerceris, which attacks the coleoptera, and the Scolia, which preys upon the larvae of the rose-beetle, sting them only once and in a single place, because there is concentrated the mass of the motor ganglions. The Pompilus, which selects a spider for its victim, no less than the redoubtable Tarantula, knows that its quarry "has two nervous centres which animate respectively the movements of the limbs and those of the terrible fangs; hence the two stabs of the sting." (7/36.) The Sphex plunges her dagger three times into the breast of the cricket, because she knows, by an intuition that we cannot comprehend, that the locomotor innervation of the cricket is actuated by three nervous centres, which lie wide apart. (7/37.) Finally, the Ammophila, "the highest manifestation of the logic of instinct, whose profound knowledge leaves us confounded, stabs the caterpillar in nine places, because the body of the victim with which it feeds its larvae is a series of rings, set end to end, each of which possesses its little independent nervous centre." (7/38.) This is not all; the genius of the Sphex is not yet at the end of its foresight. You have doubtless heard of the comatose state into which the wounded fall when, after a fracture of the skull, the brain is compressed by a violent haemorrhage or a bony splinter. The physiologists imitate this process of nature when they wish, for example, to obtain, in animals under experiment, a state of complete immobility. But did the first surgeon who thought of trepanning the skull in order to exert on the brain, by means of a sponge, a certain degree of compression, ever imagine that an analogous procedure had long been employed in the insect world, and that these clumsy methods were merely child's play beside the astonishing feats of the Unconscious?