Two years of larval life, and the subject of our sketch is lost to the sight of the rural folks. A new life, where feeding is no longer necessary, awaits him, but one in which the most radical changes must occur if he is to fulfil the existence which nature designed in her grand scheme of creation. From a silk-gland, which, unlike those of the butterflies and moths, is situated at the end of the body, he spins a cocoon, but there being so little of silk to spare, he needs must supply the deficiency by the utilization of a quantity of sand, which he glues into the walls of his house. Here he dwells a comparatively inactive pupa for three brief weeks, retaining his large, powerful mandibles to the last, which he uses in cutting his way out of the cocoon, when he is ready to emerge as a winged neuropter. In the adult form he resembles the dragon-flies in flight, flapping wildly and irregularly about, as if his muscles were too weak to wield his great stretch of wings. But in repose his alar appendages are folded above each other, forming an acute-angled roof above the long, slender abdomen. The antennæ or feelers are short, stout and club-shaped, and the wings long, narrow and densely veined. _Myrmeleon obsoletus_, a name given to this insect by Thomas Say, a naturalist of repute, who lived in Philadelphia in the early half of the present century, is by no means a rare species, if search is made in the proper places. In the cut the larva is found to the right of the burrow, while deep in the bottom, with the jaws only in view, is another, prepared to receive the small ant just above should it lose its foothold and tumble into the trap. On the wing, a little in the background of the picture, may be seen the adult insect, represented in hawking for prey over a meadowy expanse of country. TOWER-BUILDING CICADA.