In the morning, when the rays of the sun visit the cage placed in the window of my study, I serve out the day’s ration, a sheaf of green spikes of common grass picked outside my door. The Dectici come running up to the handful, gather round it and, very peaceably, without quarrelling among themselves, dig with their mandibles between the bristles of the spikes to extract and nibble the unripe seeds. Their costume makes one think of a flock of Guinea-fowl pecking the grain scattered by the farmer’s wife. When the spikes are robbed of their tender seeds, the rest is scorned, however urgent the claims of hunger may be. To break the monotony of the diet as much as is possible in these dog-days, when everything is burnt up, I gather a thick-leaved, fleshy plant which is not too sensitive to the summer heat. This is the common purslane, another invader of our garden-beds. The new green stuff meets with a good reception; and once again the Dectici dig their teeth not into the leaves and the juicy stalks, but only into the swollen capsules of half-formed grains. This taste for tender seeds surprises me: δηκτικός, biting, fond of biting, the lexicon tells us. A name that expresses nothing, a mere identification-number, is able to satisfy the nomenclator; in my opinion, if the name possesses a characteristic meaning and at the same time sounds well, it is all the better for it. Such is the case here. The Decticus is eminently an insect given to biting. Mind your finger if the sturdy Grasshopper gets hold of it: he will rip it till the blood comes. And can this powerful jaw, of which I have to beware when I handle the creature, possess no other function than to chew soft grains? Can a mill like this have only to grind little unripe seeds? Something has escaped me. So well-armed with mandibular pincers, so well-endowed with masticatory muscles that swell out his cheeks, the Decticus must cut up some leathery prey. This time I find the real diet, the fundamental if not the exclusive one. Some good-sized Locusts are let into the cage. I put in it the species mentioned in a note below, [41] now one, now the other, as they happen to get caught in my net. A few Grasshoppers [42] are also accepted, but not so readily. There is every reason to think that, if I had had the luck to capture them, the entire Locust and Grasshopper family would have met the same fate, provided that they were not too insignificant in size.