I will avoid tedious repetition and content myself with adding to my old sheaf of proofs a few facts which have not yet been related. The Nest-building Odynerus showed us in her cells a few Chrysomela-larvae fixed by the hinder part to the side of the reed. The grub fastens itself in this way to the poplar-leaf to obtain a purchase when the moment has come for leaving the larval slough. Do not these preparations for the nymphosis tell us plainly that the creature is not dead? The Hairy Ammophila affords us an even better example. A number of caterpillars operated on before my eyes attained, some sooner, some later, the chrysalis stage. My notes are explicit on the subject of some of them, taken on Verbascum sinuatum. Sacrificed on the 14th of April, they were still irritable when tickled with a straw a fortnight after. A little later, the pale-green colouring of the early stages is replaced by a reddish brown, except on two or three segments of the median ventral surface. The skin wrinkles and splits, but does not come detached of its own accord. I can easily remove it in shreds. Under this slough appears the firm, chestnut-brown horn integument of the chrysalis. The development of the nymphosis is so correct that for a moment the crazy hope occurs to me that I may see a Turnip-moth come out of this mummy, the victim of a dozen dagger-thrusts. For the rest, there is no attempt at spinning a cocoon, no jet of silky threads flung out by the caterpillar before turning into a chrysalis. Perhaps under normal conditions metamorphosis takes place without this protection. However, the moth whom I expected to see was beyond the limits of the possible. In the middle of May, a month after the operation on the caterpillars, my three chrysalids, still incomplete underneath, in the three or four middle segments, withered and at last went mouldy. Is the evidence conclusive this time? Who can conceive such a silly idea as that a prey really dead, a corpse preserved from putrefaction by an antiseptic, could contain what is perhaps the most delicate work of life, the development of the grub into the perfect insect?