One last characteristic, more important than all the rest, places these pigmies in a category completely by themselves. From time to time I see on their backs a monstrous protuberance which mounts as high as the neck and doubles the creature’s bulk. Now this hump, which is here to-day and gone to-morrow, only to reappear later, is the conjurer’s wallet containing the future. When I manage to open one, without mishap, with the point of a needle, I extract from it a slimy speck displaying two black eye-spots, with traces of segmentation. My Cæsarean operation has laid bare an embryo. I reserved the right to pass, grammatically, from the masculine to the feminine gender. And this is the time to do so. I isolate a few of the hunch-backed squaws in a small glass tube, with a scrap of gall. They give me young ones; and the humps disappear. The observation, unfortunately, cannot be continued: the scrap of gall withers and my specimens die. None the less it is now established that these pigmy Lice are mothers and that they carry knapsacks on their backs as incubating pockets. The little red tortoises found in all the galls in the late summer are therefore as prolific as the famous old woman who lived in a shoe: they alone bring forth young. All around them swarm their descendants, fat orange babies, who deck themselves in snow-white furbelows, suck the sap, distend their stomachs and prepare to grow wings in view of an approaching migration. Are the hunch-backed mothers all the immediate daughters of the black Louse, the founder of the gall, or do they form a lineage at various removes? The latter seems probable in the horn-shaped galls, where the mothers are so exceedingly numerous. A single origin would not account for this prodigality. As for the other, far less thickly-populated galls, it seems to me that a single generation of red Lice would be sufficient. Let me mention a few approximate figures. In the first week of September I open a horn-shaped gall, selected from among the largest. It measures eight inches in length by nearly an inch and a half in thickness at its greatest diameter. The population consists mainly of orange Lice, plump, smooth, and endowed with wing-stumps. These are the progeny of the tiny mothers. These latter are scarlet, stocky and wrinkled, with their fore-part tapering and their hinder-part as if it were cut off short, so that their shape is almost triangular. As far as I can judge in the confusion of such a multitude, they should number some hundreds.