Let us recapitulate the habits of the Cionus, very strange habits in an insect of the Weevil series. The mother entrusts her eggs to the swelling capsules of the scallop-leaved mullein. So far, everything is according to rule. Other Weevils, as a matter of fact, prefer, when setting their children up in life, the pods of some other mullein, or those of the figwort or of the snap-dragon, two plants belonging to one and the same botanical family. But now we are suddenly confronted with the strange and exceptional. The mother Cionus chooses the mullein with the smallest capsules, whereas in the neighbourhood and at the same season there are others loaded with fruit whose dimensions would provide spacious lodgings and abundance of food. She prefers dearth to plenty and narrow to spacious quarters. Worse still. Indifferent to leaving provision for her brood, she nibbles the tender seeds, destroys them, extirpates them, in order to obtain a cavity in the heart of the tiny globule. Into this she slips more or less half a dozen eggs. With the edible substance left, were the whole cell to be consumed, there would not be enough to feed a single grub. When the bread-pan is empty, the house is deserted. The young abandon their famine-stricken dwelling on the day when they are hatched. They are bold innovators and practise a method which is held in detestation among the Weevils, who are all pre-eminently stay-at-homes: they dare the dangers of the outer world: they travel, passing from one leaf to another in search of food. This strange exodus, unprecedented in a Weevil, is not a mere caprice but a necessity imposed on them by hunger; they migrate because their mother has not provided them with anything to eat. If travelling has its pleasures, enough to make the insect forget the delights of the cell in which it digests at peace, it also has its drawbacks. The legless grub can progress only by a sort of creeping gait. It has no instrument of adherence which will enable it to remain fixed to the twig, whence the least breath of wind may make it fall. Necessity is the mother of invention. To guard against the danger of falling, the wanderer smears itself with a viscous fluid, which varnishes it and makes it adhere to the trail which it is following. But this is not all. When the ticklish moment of the nymphosis arrives, a retreat in which the grub can undergo its transformation in peace becomes indispensable. The vagabond has nothing of the sort. It is homeless, it sleeps in the open air; yet it is able, when the time comes, to make itself a tent, a capsule, the materials for which are supplied by its intestine. No other insect of its order can build a home like this. Let us hope that the hateful Chalcid, the murderer of nymphs, will not visit it in its pretty little tent.