History tells us that certain peoples, the Massagetae and others, used to kill off their old men to save them from senile misery. The fatal blow on the hoary skull was in their eyes an act of filial piety. The Necrophori have their share of these ancient barbarities. Full of days and henceforth useless, dragging out a weary existence, they mutually exterminate one another. Why prolong the agony of the impotent and the imbecile? The Massagetae might plead, as an excuse for their atrocious custom, a dearth of provisions, which is an evil counsellor; not so the Necrophori, for, thanks to my generosity, victuals are more than plentiful, both beneath the soil and on the surface. Famine plays no part in this slaughter. What we see is an aberration due to exhaustion, the morbid fury of a life on the point of extinction. As is generally the case, work bestows a peaceable disposition on the grave-digger, while inaction inspires him with perverted tastes. Having nothing left to do, he breaks his kinsman's limbs and eats him up, heedless of being maimed or eaten himself. It is the final deliverance of verminous old age. This murderous frenzy, breaking out late in life, is not peculiar to the Necrophorus. I have described elsewhere the perversity of the Osmia, so placid in the beginning. Feeling her ovaries exhausted, she smashes her neighbours' cells and even her own; she scatters the dusty honey, rips open the egg, eats it. The Mantis devours the lovers who have played their parts; the mother Decticus willingly nibbles a thigh of her decrepit husband; the merry Crickets, once the eggs are laid in the ground, indulge in tragic domestic quarrels and with not the least compunction slash open one another's bellies. When the cares of the family are finished, the joys of life are finished likewise. The insect then sometimes becomes depraved; and its disordered mechanism ends in aberrations. The larva has nothing striking to show in the way of industry. When it has fattened to the desired extent, it leaves the charnel-house of the natal crypt and descends into the earth, far from the putrefaction. Here, working with its legs and its dorsal armour, it presses back the sand around it and makes itself a close cabin wherein to rest for the metamorphosis. When the lodge is ready and the torpor of the approaching moult arrives, it lies inert; but, at the least alarm, it comes to life and turns round on its axis. Even so do several nymphs spin round and round when disturbed, notably that of _AEgosomus scabricornis_ which I have now before my eyes in July. It is always a fresh surprise to see these mummies suddenly throw off their immobility and gyrate on their own axis with a mechanism whose secret deserves to be fathomed. The science of rational mechanics might find something here to whet its finest theories upon. The strength and litheness of a clown cannot compare with those of this budding flesh, this hardly coagulated glair.