The observer on whose authority Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau says a word or two touching the habits of this same Sphex witnessed a similar storing away of Locusts in Africa, near Oran. He surprised a Yellow-winged Sphex dragging an Acridian along. Was it an accidental case, like that which I witnessed on the banks of the Rhône? Was it an exception or the rule? Can there be a lack of Crickets in the country around Oran and does the Wasp fill their place with Acridians? The force of circumstances compels me to put the question without finding a reply. This is the place to interpolate a certain passage from Lacordaire’s [27] Introduction to Entomology against which I am eager to protest. Here it is: ‘Darwin, [28] who wrote a book on purpose to prove the identity of the intellectual principle actuating men and animals, was walking one day in his garden when he saw on the path a Sphex who had just possessed herself of a Fly almost as large as herself. He saw her cut off the victim’s head and abdomen with her mandibles, keeping only the thorax, to which the wings remained attached, after which she flew away; but a breath of wind, striking the Fly’s wings, made the Sphex spin round and prevented her progress; hereupon she alighted again on the path, cut off one of the Fly’s wings and then the other, and, after thus destroying the cause of her difficulties, resumed her flight with what remained of her prey. This fact carries with it manifest signs of reasoning power. Instinct might have led this Sphex to cut off her victim’s wings before carrying it to her nest, as do some species of the same genus; but here there was a sequence of ideas and results from those ideas, which are quite inexplicable unless we allow the intervention of reason.’ This little story, which so lightly grants reason to an insect, lacks I will not say truth, but even mere likelihood, not in the act itself, which I accept without reserve, but in the motives for the act. Darwin saw what he tells us; only, he was mistaken as to the heroine of the drama, the drama itself and its significance. He was profoundly mistaken; and I will prove it.