The last cricket being finished, the larva sets to work to spin a cocoon. In less than forty-eight hours the work is completed, and henceforward the skilful worker may yield within an impenetrable shelter to the overpowering lethargy which is stealing over it—a state of being which is neither sleeping nor waking, death nor life, whence it will issue transfigured ten months later. Few cocoons are so complex as is this one. Besides a coarse outer network, there are three distinct layers, forming three cocoons, one within another. Let us examine in detail these various courses of the silken edifice. First comes an open network, coarse and cobwebby, on which the larva places itself and hangs as in a hammock to work more easily at the cocoon properly so called. This incomplete net, hastily spun to serve as a scaffolding, is made with threads carelessly placed and holding grains of sand, bits of earth, and remains from the larva’s banquet—cricket’s thighs, still banded with red, feet, and skull. The next covering, which is the first of the real cocoon, is a felted wrapper, light red, very fine, very supple, and somewhat crumpled. A few threads cast here and there connect it with the preceding scaffolding and the following covering. It forms a cylindrical purse, with no opening and too large for what it contains, thus causing the surface to wrinkle. Then comes an elastic case, markedly smaller than the purse which contains it, almost cylindrical, and rounded at the upper end, toward which is turned the head of the larva, while at the lower it makes a blunt cone. Its colour is light red, except towards the lower end, where the shade is darker. It is fairly firm, though it yields to a moderate pressure, except in the conical part, which resists and seems to contain a hard substance. On opening this sheath it is seen to be formed of two layers closely pressed together, but easily separable. The outer is a silken felt precisely like that of the preceding purse, the inner one, the third of the cocoon, is a kind of lacquer—a brilliant violet-brown varnish, fragile, very soft to the touch, and of quite a different nature to the rest of the cocoon. The microscope shows that instead of being a felt of silky filaments like the other coverings, it is a homogeneous covering of a peculiar varnish, whose origin is, as we shall see, sufficiently strange. As for the resistance of the conical end of the cocoon, one finds it caused by a load of friable matter, dark violet, and shining with numerous black particles. This load is the dry mass of excrement, ejected once for all by the larva, inside its cocoon, and to it is due the darker colour of the conical end. The average length of this complex dwelling is twenty-seven millimetres, and its greatest width nine.