One remark more. Fresh food is absolutely necessary for the Wasp’s larvæ. If the prey were warehoused in the burrow intact, in four or five days it would be a corpse abandoned to corruption; and the scarce-hatched grub would find nothing to live upon but a putrid mass. Pricked with the sting, however, it can keep alive for two or three weeks, a period more than long enough to allow the egg to hatch and the larva to grow. The paralysing of the victim therefore has a twofold result: first, the living dish remains motionless and the safety of the delicate grub is not endangered; secondly, the meat keeps good a long time and thus ensures wholesome food for the larva. Man’s logic, enlightened by science, could discover nothing better. My two other Ephippigers stung by the Sphex were kept in the dark with food. To feed inert insects, hardly differing from corpses except by the perpetual waving of their long antennæ, seems at first an impossibility; still, the play of the mouth-parts gave me some hope and I tried. My success exceeded my anticipations. There was no question here, of course, of giving them a lettuce-leaf or any other piece of green stuff on which they might have browsed in their normal state; they were feeble valetudinarians, who needed spoon-feeding, so to speak, and supporting with liquid nourishment. I used sugar-and-water. Laying the insect on its back, I place a drop of the sugary fluid on its mouth with a straw. The palpi at once begin to stir; the mandibles and jaws move. The drop is swallowed with evident satisfaction, especially after a somewhat prolonged fast. I repeat the dose until it is refused. The meal takes place once a day, sometimes twice, at irregular intervals, lest I should become too much of a slave to my patients. Well, one of the Ephippigers lived for twenty-one days on this meagre fare. It was not much, compared with the eighteen days of the one whom I had left to die of starvation. True, the insect had twice had a bad fall, having dropped from the experimenting-table to the floor owing to some piece of awkwardness on my part. The bruises which it received must have hastened its end. The other, which suffered no accidents, lived for forty days. As the nourishment employed, sugar-and-water, could not indefinitely take the place of the natural green food, it is very likely that the insect would have lived longer still if the usual diet had been possible. And so the point which I had in view is proved: the victims stung by the Digger-wasps die of starvation and not of their wounds. CHAPTER X THE IGNORANCE OF INSTINCT