Let us now watch the Wasp when, having prepared the burrow, she goes back for her victim, which, after its capture and the operation that paralysed it, she has left at no great distance. The Ephippiger is in a condition similar to that of the Cricket sacrificed by the Yellow-winged Sphex, a condition proving for certain that stings have been driven into her thoracic ganglia. Nevertheless, a good many movements still continue; but they are disconnected, though endowed with a certain vigour. Incapable of standing on its legs, the insect lies on its side or on its back. It flutters its long antennæ and also its palpi; it opens and closes its mandibles and bites as hard as in the normal state. The abdomen heaves rapidly and deeply. The ovipositor is brought back sharply under the belly, against which it almost lies flat. The legs stir, but languidly and irregularly; the middle legs seem more torpid than the others. If pricked with a needle, the whole body shudders convulsively; efforts are made to get up and walk, but without success. In short, the insect would be full of life, but for its inability to move about or even to stand upon its legs. We have here therefore a wholly local paralysis, a paralysis of the legs, or rather a partial abolition and ataxy of their movements. Can this very incomplete inertia be caused by some special arrangement of the victim’s nervous system, or does it come from this, that the Wasp perhaps administers only a single prick, instead of stinging each ganglion of the thorax, as the Cricket-huntress does? I cannot tell. Still, for all its shivering, its convulsions, its disconnected movements, the victim is none the less incapable of hurting the larva that is meant to devour it. I have taken from the burrow of the Sphex Ephippigers struggling just as lustily as when they were first half-paralysed; and nevertheless the feeble grub, hatched but a few hours since, was digging its teeth into the gigantic victim in all security; the dwarf was biting into the colossus without danger to itself. This striking result is due to the spot selected by the mother for laying her egg. I have already said how the Yellow-winged Sphex glues her egg to the Cricket’s breast, a little to one side, between the first and second pair of legs. Exactly the same place is chosen by the White-edged Sphex; and a similar place, a little farther back, towards the root of one of the large hind-thighs, is adopted by the Languedocian Sphex, all three thus giving proof, by this uniformity, of wonderful discernment in picking out the spot where the egg is bound to be safe.