The males are stridulating by themselves, here and there, teasing the passing fair with their antennæ. The future mothers stroll about gravely, with their sabre half-raised. The agitation and feverish excitement means that the great business of pairing is at hand. The fact will escape no practised eye. It is also what I particularly wish to observe. My chief object in stocking my cages was to discover how far the strange nuptial manners revealed by the White-faced Decticus might be regarded as general. My wish is satisfied, but not fully, for the late hours at which events take place did not allow me to witness the final act of the wedding. It is late at night or early in the morning that things happen. The little that I see is confined to interminable preludes. Standing face to face, with foreheads almost touching, the lovers feel and sound each other for a long time with their limp antennæ. They suggest two fencers crossing and recrossing harmless foils. From time to time, the male stridulates a little, gives a few short strokes of the bow and then falls silent, feeling perhaps too much overcome to continue. Eleven o’clock strikes; and the declaration is not yet over. Very regretfully, but conquered by sleepiness, I quit the couple. Next morning, early, the female carries, hanging at the bottom of her ovipositor, the queer bladderlike arrangement that surprised us so much in the Decticus. It is an opaline capsule, the size of a large pea and roughly subdivided into a small number of egg-shaped vesicles. When the Grasshopper walks, the thing scrapes along the ground and becomes dirty with sticky grains of sand. The final banquet of the female Decticus is seen again here in all its hideousness. When, after a couple of hours, the fertilizing capsule is drained of its contents, the Grasshopper devours it bit by bit; for a long time she chews and rechews the gummy morsel and ends by swallowing it all down. In less than half a day, the milky burden has disappeared, consumed with zest down to the last atom. The inconceivable therefore, imported, one would think, from another planet, so far removed is it from earthly habits, reappears with no noticeable variation in the Grasshopper, following on the Decticus. What singular folk are the Locustidæ, one of the oldest races in the animal kingdom on dry land! It seems probable that these eccentricities are the rule throughout the order. Let us consult another sabre-bearer.