I have just what is needed at my disposal without rushing off to the butcher’s for a supply. In the garden, at this moment, supported on reed tripods, there are certain aerial retting-vats in which Moles, Snakes, Lizards, Toads, Fish and so on attract interminable visits from the undertakers of the neighbourhood. The most numerous is a Dermestes, precisely the same as the one in the tallow-loft. This is the very thing I want. I serve this Dermestes to my Reduvii, I serve him up lavishly. A frenzied massacre takes place. Every morning the sand in the jar is strewn with corpses, many of which are still lying beneath the murderer’s beak. The conclusion is obvious: the Reduvius kills the Dermestes whenever the opportunity occurs; without having an exclusive taste for this sort of game, he bleeds it, more or less eagerly, when he comes across it. I shall communicate this result to the worthy fellow to whom I owe the ingredients of this story. I shall tell him: “Leave them alone, the ugly creatures whom you see sleeping on the walls of your loft; don’t drive them away with your broom. They are doing you a service; they wage war upon the others, the Dermestes, who are so destructive to hides.” It may well be that the abundance of Dermestes, an easy prey, was not the motive which attracted the Reduvii to the butcher’s garret. Elsewhere, out of doors, there is no lack of game, in great variety and no less appreciated. Why do the Bugs prefer to gather here? I suspect that they wish to establish a family. The laying-season cannot be far away; and the Reduvius has come with the particular object of providing food and lodging for her offspring. In fact, at the end of June I obtain the first eggs in my jars. For a fortnight the Bugs continue to lay abundantly. A few mothers, reared separately, enable me to estimate their fecundity. I count up thirty to forty eggs for each mother. Here we no longer see the orderliness dear to the Forest-bugs, who arrange their eggs on a leaf so methodically, in rows of beads. Far from representing an extremely accurate piece of work, the Masked Bug’s batch of eggs is strewn, clumsily, at random. The eggs are isolated, adhering neither to one another nor to their support. In my rearing-jars they are scattered over the surface of the sand. Granular specks of which the mother has taken no care whatever, not even troubling to fasten them anywhere, they roll hither and thither, at the least breath of air. A plant is not more heedless of its seeds, which go where the wind blows them.