All has not been told concerning the Meloidae, those strange parasites, some of which, the Sitares and the Oil-beetles, attach themselves, like the tiniest of Lice, to the fleece of various Bees to get themselves carried into the cell where they will destroy the egg and afterwards feed upon the ration of honey. A most unexpected discovery, made a few hundred yards from my door, has warned me once again how dangerous it is to generalize. To take it for granted, as the mass of data hitherto collected seemed to justify us in doing, that all the Meloidae of our country usurp the stores of honey accumulated by the Bees, was surely a most judicious and natural generalization. Many have accepted it without hesitation; and I for my part was one of them. For on what are we to base our conviction when we imagine that we are stating a law? We think to take our stand upon the general; and we plunge into the quicksands of error. And behold, the law of the Meloidae has to be struck off the statutes, a fate common to many others, as this chapter will prove. On the 16th of July, 1883, I was digging, with my son Emile, in the sandy heap where, a few days earlier, I had been observing the labours and the surgery of the Mantis-killing Tachytes. My purpose was to collect a few cocoons of this Digger-wasp. The cocoons were turning up in abundance under my pocket-trowel, when Emile presented me with an unknown object. Absorbed in my task of collection, I slipped the find into my box without examining it further than with a rapid glance. We left the spot. Half-way home, the ardour of my search became assuaged; and a thought of the problematical object, so negligently dropped into the box among the cocoons, flashed across my mind. "Hullo!" I said to myself. "Suppose it were _that_? Why not? But, no, yes, it _is_ that; that's just what it is!" Then, suddenly turning to Emile, who was rather surprised by this soliloquy: "My boy," I said, "you have had a magnificent find. It's a pseudochrysalis of the Meloidae. It's a document of incalculable value; you've struck a fresh vein in the extraordinary records of these creatures. Let us look at it closely and at once." The thing was taken from the box, dusted by blowing on it and carefully examined. I really had before my eyes the pseudochrysalis of some Meloid. Its shape was unfamiliar to me. No matter: I was an old hand and could not mistake its source. Everything assured me that I was on the track of an insect that rivalled the Sitares and the Oil-beetles in the strangeness of its transformations; and, what was a still more precious fact, its occurrence amid the burrows of the Mantis-killer told me that its habits would be wholly different. "It's very hot, my poor Emile; we are both of us pretty done. Never mind: let's go back to our sand-hill and dig and have another search. I must have the larva that comes before the pseudochrysalis; I must, if possible, have the insect that comes out of it."