At first sight this storing of food appears simple enough, but reflexion soon discovers graver difficulties. Our own game is brought down by a shot and killed with horrible wounds. The Hymenopteron has refinements unknown to us; she chooses to have her prey intact, with all its elegance of form and colour. No broken limbs, no gaping wounds, no hideous disembowelment. Her prey has all the freshness of the living insect; she does not destroy an atom of the fine-coloured powder which the mere contact of our fingers deflowers. If the insect were really dead, really a corpse, how difficult it would be for us to obtain such a result! Any one can slay an insect by stamping brutally on it, but to kill it neatly leaving no sign is no easy operation, within every one’s power. How many of us would be at our wits’ end if we had to kill on the spot, without crushing it, a little creature so tenacious of life that even beheaded it still goes on struggling! One must have been a practical entomologist before thinking of asphyxiation, and here, again, success would be doubtful with the primitive methods of vapour of benzine or burnt sulphur. In this deleterious atmosphere the insect struggles too long, and tarnishes its brightness. One must have recourse to more heroic methods—for instance, to the terrible exhalations of prussic acid slowly disengaging themselves from strips of paper impregnated with cyanide of potassium, or better still, as being without danger to the collector, to the thunderbolt of vapour of bisulphide of carbon. It requires a real art, an art calling to its aid the redoubtable arsenal of chemistry, to kill an insect neatly; to do that is what the elegant method of the Cerceris brings about so quickly, if we admit the stupid supposition that her prey really becomes a dead body. A dead body! But that is by no means the diet of the larvæ, little ogres greedy for fresh meat, to whom game ever so slightly tainted would inspire insurmountable disgust. They must have fresh meat with no high taste—that first sign of decay. Yet the prey cannot be laid up alive in the cell like animals destined to furnish fresh meat to the crew and passengers of a vessel. What would become of a delicate egg laid among living food? What would become of the feeble larva, a worm bruised by the slightest thing among vigorous Coleoptera moving their long spurred legs for whole weeks? It is absolutely necessary—and here we seem caught in a blind alley—to obtain deathly immobility with the freshness of life for the interior organs. Before such an alimentary problem the best instructed man of the world would stand helpless—even the practised entomologist would own himself at a loss. The larder of the Cerceris would defy their reasoning powers.