Let us observe the proceedings in detail. Feeling itself ripe for transformation, the creature clutches the trelliswork of the cage with its hinder and intermediary legs. The fore-legs are folded and crossed over the breast and are not employed in supporting the insect, which hangs in a reversed position, back downwards. The triangular pinions, the sheaths of the wing-cases, open their peaked roof and separate sideways; the two narrow strips, the germs of the wings, stand in the centre of the uncovered space and diverge slightly. The position for the moult has now been taken with the necessary stability. The first thing to be done is to burst the old tunic. Behind the corselet, under the pointed roof of the prothorax, pulsations are produced by alternate inflation and deflation. A similar operation is performed in front of the neck and probably also under the entire covering of the shell that is to be split. The delicacy of the membranes at the joints enables us to perceive what is going on at these bare points, but the harness of the corselet hides it from us in the central portion. It is there that the insect’s reserves of blood flow in waves. The rising tide expresses itself in blows of an hydraulic battering-ram. Distended by this rush of humours, by this injection wherein the organism concentrates its energies, the skin at last splits along a line of least resistance prepared by life’s subtle previsions. The fissure yawns all along the corselet, opening precisely over the keel, as though the two symmetrical halves had been soldered. Unbreakable any elsewhere, the wrapper yields at this median point which is kept weaker than the rest. The split is continued some little way back and runs between the fastenings of the wings; it goes up the head as far as the base of the antennæ, where it sends a short ramification to the right and left. Through this break the back is seen, quite soft, pale, hardly tinged with grey. Slowly it swells into a larger and larger hunch. At last it is wholly released. The head follows, extracted from its mask, which remains in its place, intact in the smallest particular, but looking strange with its great glassy eyes that do not see. The sheaths of the antennæ, with not a wrinkle, with nothing out of order and with their normal position unchanged, hang over this dead face, which is now translucent. Therefore, in emerging from their narrow sheaths, which enclosed them with such absolute precision, the antennary threads encountered no resistance capable of turning their scabbards inside out, or disturbing their shape, or even wrinkling them. Without injuring the twisted containers, the contents, equal in size and themselves twisted, have managed to slip out as easily as a smooth, straight object would do, if sliding in a loose sheath. The extraction-mechanism will be still more remarkable in the case of the hind-legs.