Which of the two takes the initiative here? Have not the parts been reversed? She who is usually provoked is now the provoker, employing rude caresses capable of carrying off the morsel touched. She has not yielded to him; she has thrust herself upon him, disturbingly, imperiously. He, lying flat on the ground, quivers and starts, seems trying to resist. What outrageous thing is about to happen? I shall not know to-day. The floored male releases himself and runs away. But this time, at last, we have it. Master Decticus is on the ground, tumbled over on his back. Hoisted to the full height of her shanks, the other, holding her sabre almost perpendicular, covers her prostrate mate from a distance. The two ventral extremities curve into a hook, seek each other, meet; and soon from the male’s convulsive loins there is seen to issue, in painful labour, something monstrous and unheard-of, as though the creature were expelling its entrails in a lump. It is an opalescent bag, similar in size and colour to a mistletoe-berry, a bag with four pockets marked off by faint grooves, two larger ones above and two smaller ones below. In certain cases the number of cells increases and the whole assumes the appearance of a packet of eggs such as Helix aspersa, the Common Snail, lays in the ground. The strange concern remains hanging from the lower end of the sabre of the future mother, who solemnly retires with the extraordinary wallet, the spermatophore, as the physiologists call it, the source of life for the ovules, in other words the cruet which will now in due course transmit to the proper place the necessary complement for the evolution of the germs. A capsule of this kind is a rare, an infinitely rare thing in the world of to-day. So far as I know, the Cephalopods [45] and the Scolopendras [46] are, in our time, the only other animals that make use of the queer apparatus. Now Octopuses and Millepedes date back to the earliest ages. The Decticus, another representative of the old world, seems to tell us that what is a curious exception now might well have been a more or less general rule originally, all the more so as we shall come upon similar incidents in the case of the other Grasshoppers. When the male has recovered from his shock, he shakes the dust off himself and once more begins his merry click-clack. For the present let us leave him to his joys and follow the mother that is to be, pacing along solemnly with her burden, which is fastened with a plug of jelly as transparent as glass. At intervals she draws herself up on her shanks, curls into a ring and seizes her opalescent load in her mandibles, nibbling it calmly and squeezing it, but without tearing the wrapper or shedding any of the contents. Each time, she removes from the surface a particle which she chews and then chews again slowly, ending by swallowing it.