And see the immense and luminous advantage which a description of this kind, told in two or three words, would possess over those long descriptive details, sometimes so hard to grasp. Suppose that you wish to make the Languedocian Sphex known to me and you begin by describing the number and distribution of the nervures of the wings; you speak to me of cubital nervures and recurrent nervures. Next comes the insect’s pen-portrait. Black here, rusty red there, smoky brown at the tips of the wings; black velvet in this part, silvery down in that, a smooth surface in a third. It is all very definite and minute: we must do this much justice to the precision and patience of the narrator; but it is very long and also it is by no means always clear, so much so that we may be excused if we are not quite able to follow it, even when we are not altogether new to the business. But add to the tedious description merely this: ‘Hunts Ephippigers’; and these two words at once shed light: there is no possibility of my now mistaking my Sphex, for she alone possesses the monopoly of that particular prey. To give this illuminating note, what would be needed? The habit of really observing and of not making entomology consist of so many series of impaled insects. But let us pass on and examine the little that is known about the hunting methods of the foreign Sphex-wasps. I open Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau’s [26] Natural History of Hymenoptera and find that, on the other side of the Mediterranean, in our Algerian provinces, the Yellow-winged Sphex and the White-edged Sphex retain the same habits that characterize them here. They capture Orthoptera in the land of palm-trees even as they do in the land of olive-trees. Though separated from the others by the vast width of the sea, the hunting compatriots of the Kabyles and the Berbers pursue the same game as their kindred in Provence. I also see that a fourth species, the African Sphex (S. afra), is the scourge of the Locusts in the neighbourhood of Oran. Lastly, I remember reading, I forget where, of a fifth species which also wages war on Locusts in the steppes near the Caspian. Thus, on the borders of the Mediterranean, we have five different species of Sphex, whose larvæ all live on a diet of Orthoptera.