Ten days' rearing in the partitioned box is enough to prove how right I was when I looked upon the parasitic larva feeding on Mantes as the origin of the pseudochrysalis, the object of my eager attention. The creature, which I kept supplied with additional food as long as it accepted it, stops eating at last. It becomes motionless, retracts its head slightly and bends itself into a hook. Then the skin splits across the head and down the thorax. The tattered slough is thrust back; and the pseudochrysalis appears in sight, absolutely naked. It is white at first, as the larva was; but by degrees and fairly rapidly it turns to the russet hue of virgin wax, with a brighter red at the tips of the various tubercles which indicate the future legs and mouth-parts. This shedding of the skin, which leaves the body of the pseudochrysalis uncovered, recalls the mode of transformation observed in the Oil-beetles and is different from that of the Sitares and the Zonites, whose pseudochrysalis remains wholly enveloped in the skin of the secondary larva, a sort of bag which is sometimes loose, sometimes tight and always unbroken. The mist that surrounded us at the outset is dispelled. This is indeed a Meloid, a true Meloid, one of the strangest anomalies among the parasites of its tribe. Instead of living on the honey of a Bee, it feeds on the skewerful of Mantes provided by a Tachytes. The North-American naturalists have taught us lately that honey is not always the diet of the Blister-beetles: some Meloidae in the United States devour the packets of eggs laid by the Grasshoppers. This is a legitimate acquisition on their part, not an illegal seizure of the food-stores of others. No one, as far as I am aware, had as yet suspected the true parasitism of a carnivorous Meloid. It is nevertheless very remarkable to find in the Blister-beetles, on both sides of the Atlantic, this weakness for the flavour of Locust: one devours her eggs; the other a representative of the order, in the shape of the Praying Mantis and her kin. Who will explain to me this predilection for the Orthopteron in a tribe whose chief, the Oil-beetle, accepts nothing but the mess of honey? Why do insects which appear close together in all our classifications possess such opposite tastes? If they spring from a common stock, how did the consumption of flesh supplant the consumption of honey? How did the Lamb become a Wolf? This is the great problem which was once set us, in an inverse form, by the Spotted Sapyga, a honey-eating relative of the flesh-eating Scolia.[5] I submit the question to whom it may concern. [Footnote 5: The essays on these will appear in the volume, entitled _The Hunting Wasps_, aforementioned.--_Translator's Note_.]