To explain this wonderful preservation of the tissues which makes of an insect smitten for many weeks past with a corpse-like inertness a piece of game which does not even go high and which, during the greatest heat of summer, keeps as fresh as at the moment of its capture, the able historian of the Buprestis-huntress surmises the presence of an antiseptic fluid, acting similarly to the preparations used for preserving anatomical specimens. This fluid, he suggests, can be nothing but the poison of the Wasp, injected into the victim’s body. A tiny drop of the venomous liquid accompanying the sting, the needle destined for the inoculation, would therefore serve as a kind of brine or pickle to preserve the meat on which the larva is to feed. But how immensely superior to our own pickling processes is that of the Wasp! We salt, or smoke, or tin foodstuffs which remain fit to eat, it is true, but which are very far indeed from retaining the qualities which they possessed when fresh. Tins of sardines soaked in oil, Dutch smoked herrings, codfish reduced to hard slabs by salt and sun: which of these can compare with the same fish supplied to the cook, so to speak, all alive and kicking? In the case of flesh-meat, things are even worse. Apart from salting and curing, we have nothing that can keep a piece of meat fit for consumption for even a fairly short period. Nowadays, after a thousand fruitless attempts in the most varied directions, we equip special ships at great cost; and these ships, fitted with a powerful refrigerating-plant, bring us the flesh of sheep and oxen slaughtered in the South American pampas, frozen and preserved from decomposition by the intense cold. How much more excellent is the Cerceris’ method, so swift, so inexpensive, and so efficacious! What lessons can we not learn from her transcendental chemistry! With an imperceptible drop of her poison-fluid, she straightway renders her prey incorruptible! Incorruptible, did I say? It is much more than that! The game is brought to a condition which prevents desiccation, leaves the joints supple, keeps all the organs, both internal and external, in their pristine freshness, and, in short, places the sacrificed insect in a state that differs from life only by its corpse-like immobility.