For the stab in the thoracic ganglions, however efficacious, is often insufficient. Although the six limbs are paralysed, although the victim cannot move, its mandibles, "pointed, sharp, serrated, which close like a pair of scissors, still remain a menace to the tyrant; they might at least, by gripping the surrounding grasses, oppose a more or less effectual resistance to the process of carrying off." So the preceding manoeuvres are consummated by a kind of garrotting; that is, the insect "takes care to compress the brain of its victim, but so as to avoid wounding it; producing only a stupor, a simple torpor, a passing lethargy." Is not the ingenious observer justified in concluding that "this is alarmingly scientific"? Between the dry statements of Dufour, which served Fabre as his original theme, and the unaccustomed wealth of this vast physiological poetry, what a distance has been covered! How far have we outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches! Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an inventory of the nest of a Cerceris. For him the Buprestes were dead, and their state of preservation was explained simply as a kind of embalming, due to some special action of the venom of the Hymenoptera. These facts, therefore, were stated as simple curiosities. Fabre proved that these victims possessed all the attributes of life excepting movement, by provoking contractions in their members under the influence of various stimulants, and by keeping them alive artificially for an indefinite period. On the other hand, he demonstrated the comparative innocuousness of the venom of these wasps, some of which, like the great Cerceris or the beautiful and formidable Scolia, alarm by their enormous size and their terrifying aspect; so that the conservation of the prey could not be due to any occult quality, to some more or less active antiseptic virtue of the venomous fluid, but simply to the precision of the stab and the miraculous deftness of the "surgeon." He also pointed out the fact that the sting of the insect is able immediately to dissociate the nervous system of the vegetative life from that of the correlative life, sparing the former, and taking care not to wound the abdomen, which contains the ganglions of the great sympathetic nerve, while it annihilates the latter, which is more or less concentrated along the ventral face of the thoracic region.