The murderous methods of the saladeiro are an exact repetition of what I had seen in the slaughter-house. In both these lethal work-shops they pierce the vertebral marrow at the base of the skull. The Ammophila operates in a similar fashion, with this difference, that her surgery is much more complex, much more difficult, because of the peculiar organization of her victim. The honours are on her side again when we consider the delicacy of the result obtained. Her caterpillar is not a corpse, like the Ox whose spinal cord is cut; it is alive, but incapable of movement. The insect here is man’s superior in all respects. Now how did the butcher of our parts and the desnucador of the pampas light upon the idea of plunging a knife into the seat of the marrow, in order to produce the sudden death of a colossus which would never suffer its throat to be cut without first offering a dangerous resistance? Outside those in the trade and men of science, nobody knows or suspects the lightning result of that particular wound; we are almost all in the same state of ignorance on this subject in which I myself was when my childish curiosity drew me into the killing-shed. The desnucador and the butcher have learnt their craft from the teachings of tradition and example: they have had masters; and these were brought up in the school of other masters, harking back by a chain of linked traditions to him who, served, no doubt, by some hazard of the chase, first realized the tremendous effects of a wound in the nape of the neck. Who shall tell us that a pointed flint-stone, driven by accident into the spinal marrow of the Reindeer or the Mammoth, did not rouse the attention of the desnucador’s forerunner? A casual incident furnished the original idea; observation confirmed it; reflection matured it; tradition preserved it; example disseminated it. After that, the same transmission-current. For generation might follow generation in vain: deprived of masters, the desnucador’s descendants would return to the primitive state of ignorance. Heredity does not hand down the art of killing by severing the spinal marrow: no man is born a cattle-slayer by the desnucador’s method.