How will the Sphex go to work to obtain this result? Here man, even the man of science, would hesitate, would waste his time in barren efforts and would perhaps abandon all hope of success. He can come and take one lesson from the Sphex. She, without ever being taught it, without ever seeing it practised by others, understands her surgery through and through. She knows the most delicate mysteries of the physiology of the nerves, or rather she behaves as if she did. She knows that under her victim’s skull there is a circlet of nervous nuclei, something similar to the brain of the higher animals. She knows that this main centre of innervation controls the action of the mouth-parts and moreover is the seat of the will, without whose orders not a single muscle acts; lastly, she knows that, by injuring this sort of brain, she will cause all resistance to cease, the insect no longer possessing any will to resist. As for the mode of operating, this is the easiest matter in the world to her; and, when we have been taught in her school, we are free to try her process in our turn. The instrument employed is no longer the sting: the insect, in its wisdom, has deemed compression preferable to a poisoned thrust. Let us accept its decision, for we shall see presently how prudent it is to be convinced of our own ignorance in the presence of the animal’s knowledge. Lest by editing my account I should fail to give a true impression of the sublime talent of this masterly operator, I here copy out my note as I pencilled it on the spot, immediately after the stirring spectacle. The Sphex finds that her victim is offering too much resistance, hooking itself here and there to blades of grass. She then stops to perform upon it the following curious operation, a sort of coup de grâce. The Wasp, still astride her prey, forces open the articulation of the neck, high up, at the nape. Then she seizes the neck with her mandibles and, without making any external wound, probes as far forward as possible under the skull, so as to seize and chew up the ganglia of the head. When this operation is done, the victim is utterly motionless, incapable of the least resistance, whereas previously the legs, though deprived of the power of connected movement needed for walking, vigorously opposed the process of traction. There is the fact in all its eloquence. With the points of its mandibles, the insect, while leaving uninjured the thin and supple membrane of the neck, goes rummaging into the skull and munching the brain. There is no effusion of blood, no wound, but simply an external pressure. Of course, I kept for my own purposes the Ephippiger paralysed before my eyes, in order to ascertain the effects of the operation at my leisure; also, of course, I hastened to repeat in my turn, upon live Ephippigers, what the Sphex had just taught me. I will here compare my results with the Wasp’s.