Some time after this he published another entomological work which was by no means calculated to disappoint the hopes aroused by the first. It dealt with an insect related to the Cantharides, the Sitaris humeralis, and it contained matter no less unsuspected and no less astonishing than the first. The impression produced was all the more profound in that the miracle of instinct was here accompanied by a physiological miracle, a phenomenon of metamorphosis wholly unknown, to describe which Fabre hit upon the very happy term hypermetamorphosis. To the ordinary series of transformations through which the insect passes in proceeding from the larval condition to that of the nymph and the perfect insect, this strange little beast adds another as a prelude to the first, so that the larva of the Sitaris passes through four different forms, known as the primary larva, the secondary larva, the pseudo-chrysalis, and the tertiary larva, and these resemble one another so little that only the most sustained attention on the observer’s part enables him to believe the testimony of his eyes. All these revelations keenly stimulated the curiosity and emulation of the specialists, and set them “on the track of the history, hitherto mysterious, of the Cantharides and all the insects resembling them.... A number of naturalists, Beauregard, Riley, Valéry-Mayet, Künckel d’Herculais, Lichtenstein, and others began to study the insects more or less adapted to the preparation of blisters: the Mylabres, the Meloës, the Cantharides. Lichtenstein even carried the larvæ of the Cantharides in his watch pocket, enclosed in small glass tubes, so that he could keep them warm and observe them at any moment.” It was by reading the memoir on the peregrinations and metamorphoses of the Sitaris that M. Perrier [146] made the acquaintance of Fabre’s work, of which he was to become one of the most competent judges and fervent and eloquent admirers. He referred to this essay last year in his speech at the Sérignan jubilee: It was in 1868. I had only just left the Higher Normal College, and was a very youthful assistant naturalist at the Museum. I can still see myself on the box-seat of an omnibus, crossing the Place de la Concorde, with an open book on my knees; I was reading the history of the Sitaris humeralis; I was marvelling at its complicated metamorphoses and its ruses for making its way into the nest of the solitary Bee. [147] These early essays were followed by many others, also published in the Annales des sciences naturelles, and were always received with the same favour by all the notable scientists of the time.