“Don’t lose it, whatever you do,” she impresses on her friend. “It’s the only one I have; and this isn’t the right time of moon.” Let us not laugh at this eccentric toothache-nostrum: many remedies that sprawl triumphantly over the back pages of the newspapers are no more effective. Besides, this rural simplicity is surpassed by some old books in which slumbers the science of by-gone days. An English naturalist of the sixteenth century, Thomas Moffett, the physician, [35] tells us that, if a child lose his way in the country, he will ask the Mantis to put him on his road. The Mantis, adds the author, “will stretch out one of her feet and shew him the right way and seldome or never misse.” These charming things are told with adorable simplicity: “Tam divina censetur bestiola, ut puero interroganti de via, extento digito rectam monstrat atque raro vel nunquam fallat.” Where did the credulous scholar get this pretty story? Not in England, where the Mantis cannot live; not in Provence, where we find no trace of the boyish question. All said, I prefer the spiflicating virtues of the tigno to the old naturalist’s imaginings. CHAPTER IX THE MANTIS: HER HATCHING The eggs of the Praying Mantis usually hatch in bright sunshine, at about ten o’clock on a mid-June morning. The median band or exit-zone is the only portion of the nest that affords an outlet to the youngsters. From under each scale of that zone we see slowly appearing a blunt, transparent protuberance, followed by two large black specks, which are the eyes. Softly the new-born grub slips under the thin plate and half-releases itself. Is it the little Mantis in his larval form, so nearly allied to that of the adult? Not yet. It is a transition organism. The head is opalescent, blunt, swollen, with palpitations caused by the flow of the blood. The rest is tinted reddish-yellow. It is quite easy to distinguish, under a general overall, the large black eyes clouded by the veil that covers them, the mouth-parts flattened against the chest, the legs plastered to the body from front to back. Altogether, with the exception of the very obvious legs, the whole thing, with its big blunt head, its eyes, its delicate abdominal segmentation and its boatlike shape, reminds us somewhat of the first state of the Cicadæ on leaving the egg, a state which is pictured exactly by a tiny, finless fish.