First there is a wild struggle among the blades of grass between the wasp and an Eristalis bigger than itself. The Dipteron is unarmed but strong, and a shrill hum tells of desperate resistance. The wasp carries a poignard, but does not know how to use it methodically, and is ignorant of the vulnerable points so well known to the hunters which need flesh that must keep good for a considerable time. What its nurslings want is a paste made of flies newly crushed, so that it matters little how the game is killed. The sting is used blindly—anywhere, pointed at the head, sides, thorax, or under part of the victim, as chance directs while the two wrestle. The Hymenopteron, paralysing its victim, acts like the surgeon, who directs his scalpel with a skilled hand; the wasp when slaying acts like a common assassin stabbing blindly in a struggle. Thus the resistance of the Eristalis is long, and its death rather the result of being cut up by a pair of scissors than of stabs with a dagger. These scissors are the wasp’s mandibles, cutting, disembowelling, and dividing. When the game has been garroted and is motionless between the feet of its captor, a bite of the mandibles severs the head from the body; then the wings are shorn off at the junction with the shoulder; the feet follow, cut off one by one; then the abdomen is rejected, but emptied of its interior, which the wasp appears to preserve with her favourite part, the thorax, which is richer in muscle than the rest of the Eristalis. Without further delay she flies off, carrying it between her feet. Having reached the nest she will mash it up and distribute it to the larvæ. The hornet having seized a bee acts almost in the same way, but it is a giant of a robber, and the fight cannot last long, despite the sting of the victim. Upon the very flower where the capture was made, or oftener on some twig of a neighbouring shrub, the hornet prepares its dish. First of all the bag of the bee is torn open, and the honey lapped up. The prize is thus twofold—that of a drop of honey, and the bee itself for the larvæ to feast on. Sometimes the wings are detached, as well as the abdomen, but generally the hornet is contented with making a shapeless mass of the bee which is carried off whole. It is at the nest that the parts valueless for food are rejected, especially the wings. Or the paste may be prepared on the spot, the bee being crushed at once between the hornet’s mandibles, after wings, feet, and sometimes the abdomen are cut off. Here, then, in all its details is the fact observed by Darwin. A wasp, Vespa vulgaris, seizes Eristalis tenax; with her mandibles she cuts off head, wings, and abdomen of the victim, keeping only the thorax, with which she flies away. But we need no breath of air to explain why they were cut off; the scene takes place in perfect shelter, in the grass. The captor rejects such parts as are useless for the larvæ, and that is all.