A method which could be controlled at will would offer the best guarantees, above all if employed at home, under comfortable conditions, favourable to precision. I wished, therefore, to see my insects at work on the actual table at which I am writing their history. Here very few of their secrets would escape me. This wish of mine was an old one. As a beginner, I made some experiments under glass with the Great Cerceris (C. tuberculata) and the Yellow-winged Sphex. Neither of them responded to my desires. The refusal of each to attack respectively her Cleonus or her Cricket discouraged further progress in this direction. I was wrong to abandon my attempts so soon. Now, very long afterwards, the idea occurs to me to place under glass the Bee-eating Philanthus, whom I sometimes surprise in the open engaged in forcing a bee to disgorge her honey. The captive massacres her bees in such a spirited fashion that the old hope revives stronger than ever. I contemplate reviewing all the wielders of the stiletto and forcing each to reveal her tactics. I was obliged to abate these ambitions considerably. I had some successes and many more failures. I will tell you of the former. My insect-cage is a spacious dome of wire-gauze resting on a bed of sand. Here I keep in reserve the captives of my hunting-expeditions. I feed them on honey, placed in little drops on spikes of lavender, on heads of thistle, or field eryngo, or globe-thistle, according to the season. Most of my prisoners do well on this diet and seem scarcely affected by their internment; others pine away and die in two or three days. These victims of despair nearly always throw me back, because of the difficulty of obtaining the necessary prey at short notice. Indeed it entails no small trouble to secure in the nick of time the game demanded by the huntress who has recently fallen a captive to my net. As assistant-purveyors I have a few small schoolboys, who, released from the tedium of their declensions and conjugations, set out, on leaving the classroom, to inspect the greenswards and beat the bushes in the neighbourhood on my behalf. The gros sou, the penny-piece, if you please, stimulates their zeal; but with misadventurous results! What I need to-day is Crickets. The band sallies forth and returns with not a single Cricket, but numbers of Ephippigers, for which I asked the day before yesterday and which I no longer need, my Languedocian Sphex being dead. General surprise at this sudden change of market. My young scatterbrains find it hard to understand that the beast which was so precious two days ago is now of no value whatever. When, owing to the chances of my net, a renewed demand for the Ephippiger sets in, then they will bring me the Cricket, the despised Cricket.