I have reared Sphex-grubs by giving them, one after the other, the Crickets taken from the cells; and I was then able to follow day by day the rapid progress of my nurselings. The first Cricket, the one on whom the egg was laid, is attacked, as I have said, near the point where the huntress administered her second sting, that is to say, between the first and second pair of legs. In a few days the young larva has dug in the victim’s breast a hollow large enough to admit half its body. It is not uncommon to see the Cricket, bitten to the quick, uselessly waving his antennæ and his abdominal threads, opening and closing his mandibles on space and even moving a leg. But the enemy is safe and is ransacking his entrails with impunity. What an awful nightmare for the paralysed Cricket! The first ration is finished in six or seven days’ time; none of it remains but the framework of skin, with all its parts more or less in position. The larva, whose length is now twelve millimetres, [19] leaves the Cricket’s body through the hole in the thorax which it made to start with. During this operation it moults; and its cast skin often remains caught in the opening through which it made its exit. It rests after the moulting and then attacks a second ration. Being stronger now, the larva has nothing to fear from the feeble movements of the Cricket, whose daily-increasing torpor has had time to extinguish the last glimmers of resisting-power during the week and more that has elapsed since the dagger-thrusts were given. It is therefore assailed with no precautions, usually at the belly, which is the tenderest part and the richest in juices. Soon the turn comes of the third Cricket and lastly of the fourth, who is devoured in ten hours or so. Of these last three victims all that remains is the tough integuments, whose various parts are severed one by one and carefully emptied. If a fifth ration be presented, the larva scorns it, or hardly touches it, not from abstemiousness, but from imperious necessity. For observe that hitherto the larva has ejected no excrement and that its intestines, into which four Crickets have been crammed, are distended to bursting-point. A new ration cannot therefore tempt its gluttony; and henceforth it thinks only of making itself a silken tabernacle.