Of course I gave the Cerceris back her first prey each time and withdrew my own Cleonus to examine him at my leisure. The inspection but confirmed my high opinion of the assassin’s formidable skill. It was impossible to perceive the least sign of a wound, the slightest flow of vital fluid at the point attacked. But what was most striking—and justly so—was the prompt and complete annihilation of all movement. Immediately after the murder I sought in vain for traces of irritability of the organs in the three Weevils dispatched before my eyes: those traces were never revealed, whether I pinched or pricked the insect; and it required the artificial means described above to provoke them. Thus these powerful Cleoni, which, if pierced alive with a pin and fixed on the insect-collector’s fatal sheet of cork, would have kicked and struggled for days and weeks, nay, for whole months on end, instantly lose all power of movement from the effect of a tiny prick which inoculates them with an invisible drop of venom. But chemistry has no poison so potent in so minute a dose; prussic acid would hardly produce those effects, if indeed it can produce them at all. It is not to toxology then, surely, but to physiology and anatomy that we must turn to grasp the cause of this instantaneous annihilation; and to understand these marvellous happenings we must consider not so much the intense strength of the poison injected as the importance of the organ injured. What is there, then, at the point where the sting enters? CHAPTER III A SCIENTIFIC SLAUGHTERER The wasp has told us part of her secret by showing us the spot which her sting touches. Does this solve the question? Not yet, nor by a long way. Let us go back for a moment, forget what the insect has just taught us and, in our turn, set ourselves the problem of the Cerceris. The problem is this: to store underground, in a cell, a big enough pile of game to feed the larva which will be hatched from the egg laid on the heap.