But the horror of these nuptial tragedies is surpassed by the insatiable lust, the monstrous conjunction, the bestial delights of the Mantis, that "ferocious spectre, never wearied of embraces, munching the brains of its spouse at the very moment of surrendering her flanks to him." (11/4.) Whence these strange discords, these frightful appetites? Fabre refers us to the remotest ages, to the depths of the geological night, and does not hesitate to regard these cruelties as "remnants of atavism," the lingering furies of an ancient strain, and he ventures a profound and plausible explanation. The Locusts, the Crickets, and the Scolopendrae are the last representatives of a very ancient world, of an extinct fauna, of an early creation, whose perverse and unbridled instincts were given free vent, when creation was as yet but dimly outlined, "still making the earliest essays of its organizing forces"; when the primitive Orthoptera, "the obscure forebears of those of to-day, were "sowing the wild oats of a frantic rut, "in the colossal forests of the secondary period; by the borders of the vast lakes, full of crocodiles, and antediluvian marshes, which in Provence were shaded by palms, and strange ferns, and giant Lycopodia, never as yet enlivened by the song of a bird. These monstrosities, in which life was making its essays, were subject to singular physical necessities. The female reigned alone; the male did not as yet exist, or was tolerated only for the sake of his indispensable assistance. But he served also another and less obvious end; his substance, or at least some portion of his substance, was an almost necessary ingredient in the act of generation, something in the nature of a necessary excitant of the ovaries, "a horrible titbit," which completed and consummated the great task of fecundation. Such, in Fabre's eyes, was the imperious physiological reason of these rude laws. This is why the love of the males is almost equivalent to their suicide; the Gardener-beetle, attacked by the female, attempts to flee, but does not defend himself; "it is as though an invincible repugnance prevents him from repulsing or from eating the eater." In the same way the male scorpion "allows himself to be devoured by his companion without ever attempting to employ his sting," and the lover of the Mantis "allows himself to be nibbled to pieces without any revolt on his part." A strange morality, but not more strange than the organic peculiarities which are its foundation; a strange world, but perhaps some distant sun may light others like it. These terrible creatures are a source of dismay to Fabre. If all things proceed from an underlying Reason, if the divine harmony of things testifies everywhere to a sovereign Logic, how shall the proofs of its excellence and its sovereign wisdom be found in such things as these?