Neither is it the shape. Cerceris arenaria hunts any medium-sized Weevil. I should be putting the reader's patience to too great a test if I attempted to give in this place a complete inventory of the specimens identified in her larder. I will mention only two, which my latest searches around my village have revealed. The Wasp goes hunting on the holm-oaks of the neighbouring hills the Pubescent Brachyderes (B. pubescens) and the Acorn-weevil (Balaninus glandium). What have these two Beetles in common as regards shape? I mean by shape not the structural details which the classifier examines through his magnifying-glass, not the delicate features which a Latreille would quote when drawing up a technical description, but the general picture, the general outline that impresses itself upon the vision even of an untrained eye and makes the man who knows nothing of science and above all the child, a most perspicacious observer, connect certain animals together. In this respect, what have the Brachyderes and the Balaninus in common in the eyes of the townsman, the peasant, the child or the Cerceris? Absolutely nothing. The first has an almost cylindrical figure; the second, squat, short and thickset, is conical in front and elliptical, or rather shaped like the ace of hearts, behind. The first is black, strewn with cloudy, mouse-grey spots; the second is yellow ochre. The head of the first ends in a sort of snout; the head of the second tapers into a curved beak, slender as a horse-hair and as long as the rest of the body. The Brachyderes has a massive proboscis, cut off short; the Balaninus seems to be smoking an insanely long cigarette-holder. Who would think of connecting two creatures so unlike, of calling them by the same name? Outside the professional classifiers, no one would dare to. The Cerceris, more perspicacious, knows each of them for a Weevil, a quarry with a concentrated nervous system, lending itself to the surgical feat of her single stroke of the lancet. After obtaining an abundant booty at the cost of the blunt-mouthed insect, with which she sometimes stuffs her cellars to the exclusion of any other fare, according to the hazards of the chase, she now suddenly sees before her the creature with the extravagant proboscis. Accustomed to the first, will she fail to know the second? By no means: at the first glance she recognizes it as her own; and the cell already furnished with a few Brachyderes receives its complement of Balanini. If these two species are to seek, if the burrows are far from the holm-oaks, the Cerceris will attack Weevils displaying the greatest variety of genus, species, form and coloration, levying tribute indifferently on Sitones, Cneorhini, Geonemi, Otiorhynchi, Strophosomi and many others.