The grub of the Twelve-spotted Crioceris is a dull white, with an interrupted black scarf on the first segment of the thorax. This sedentary creature has none of the talents of the acrobat grazing on the swaying foliage of the asparagus; it cannot take a grip with its posterior, turned into a prehensile finger. What use would it have for such a prerogative, loving repose as it does and destined to put on fat in its cell, without roaming in quest of food? In the same group each species has its own gifts, according to the kind of life that awaits it. It is not long before the occupied fruit falls to the ground. Day by day, it loses its green colour as the pulp is consumed. It becomes, at last, a pretty, diaphanous opal sphere, while the berries which have not been injured ripen on the plant and acquire a rich scarlet hue. When there is nothing left to eat inside the skin of its pill, the grub makes a hole in it and goes underground. The Tachinae have spared it. Its opal box, the hard rind of the berry, has ensured its safety just as well as a filthy overcoat would have done and perhaps even better. CHAPTER XVII THE CRIOCERES (_continued_) The Crioceris has found safety inside its opal globe. Safety? Ah, but what an unfortunate expression I have used! Is there any one in the world who can flatter himself that he has escaped the spoiler? In the middle of July, at the time when the Twelve-spotted Crioceris comes up from under the ground in the adult form, my rearing-jars yield me swarms of a very small Gall-fly, a slender, graceful, blue-black Chalcid, without any visible boring-tool. Has the puny creature a name? Have the nomenclators catalogued it? I do not know, nor do I much care; the main thing is to learn that the covering of the asparagus-berry, which becomes an opal globe when the grub has emptied it, has failed to save the recluse. The Tachina-midge drains her victim by herself; this other, tinier creature feasts in company. Twenty or more of them batten on the grub together. When everything seems to foretell a quiet life, a pigmy among pigmies appears, charged with the express duty of exterminating an insect which is protected first by the casket of the berry and next by the shell, the underground work of the grub. To eat the Twelve-spotted Crioceris is its mission in life, its special function. When and how does it deliver its attack? I do not know. At any rate, proud of her vocation and finding life sweet, the Chalcid curls her antennae into a crook and waves them to and fro: she rubs her tarsi together, a sign of satisfaction; she dusts her belly. I can hardly see her with the naked eye; and yet she is an agent of the universal extermination, a wheel in the implacable machine which crushes life as in a wine-press.