Reality and logic here agree. The Decticus, in point of fact, does not leave the egg in the form in which I see him, the day after his birth, hopping on the lawn; he possesses a temporary structure better-suited to the difficulties of the emergence. Coloured a delicate flesh-white, the tiny creature is cased in a scabbard which keeps the six legs flattened against the abdomen, stretching backwards, inert. In order to slip more easily under the ground, he has his shanks tied up beside his body. The antennæ, those other irksome appendages, are motionless, pressed against the parcel. The head is very much bent against the chest. With its big, black ocular specks and its undecided and rather bloated mask, it suggests a diver’s helmet. The neck opens wide at the back and, with a slow throbbing, by turns swells and subsides. That is the motor. The new-born insect moves along with the aid of its occipital hernia. When uninflated, the fore-part pushes back the damp sand a little way and slips into it by digging a tiny pit; then, blown out, it becomes a knob, which moulds itself and finds a support in the depression obtained. Then the rear-end contracts; and this gives a step forward. Each thrust of the locomotive blister means nearly a millimetre [51] traversed. It is pitiful to see this budding flesh, scarcely tinged with pink, knocking with its dropsical neck and ramming the rough soil. The animal glair, not yet quite hardened, struggles painfully with stone; and its efforts are so well directed that, in the space of a morning, a gallery opens, either straight or winding, an inch long and as wide as an average straw. In this way the harassed insect reaches the surface. Half-caught in its exit-shaft, the disinterred one halts, waits for its strength to return and then for the last time swells its occipital hernia as far as it will go and bursts the sheath that has protected it so far. The creature throws off its miner’s overall. Here at last is the Decticus in his youthful shape, quite pale still, but darker the next day and a regular blackamoor compared with the adult. As a prelude to the ivory face of a riper age, he sports a narrow white stripe under his hinder thighs. Little Decticus, hatched before my eyes, life opens for you very harshly! Many of your kindred must die of exhaustion before attaining their freedom. In my tubes I see numbers who, stopped by a grain of sand, succumb half-way and become furred with a sort of silky mildew. The mouldy part soon absorbs their poor little remains. When performed without my assistance, the coming to the light of day must be attended with even greater dangers. The usual soil is coarse and baked by the sun. Without a fall of rain, how do they manage, these immured ones?