‘Yo-heave-ho!’ says the grub; and the sausage rises a peg higher. While the extracting pad is swelling and straining every muscle, it is evident that the part still in the shell is draining itself of its humours as far as it possibly can, making them flow into the part released. It is this that makes the wire-drawing action feasible. One more effort of leverage from the inflated girdle; one more yawn: ‘Heave-ho!’ That has done the trick. The grub glides over the shell and drops. One of the nuts which have just afforded me this sight was gathered on its branch a few hours before. The grub, then, would have fallen to the ground from the height of the hazel-bush. Allowing for the proportions, such a fall would for us mean a terrible crash; for the grub, so plastic and supple, it is a trifle. It matters little to the larva whether it tumbles into the world from the top of the bush or whether it quietly changes its lodgings a little later, when the nut, fallen of its own ripeness, is lying on the ground. Without delay, as soon as free, it explores the soil within a restricted radius, seeks a point easy to dig, finds it, does a little spade-work with its jaws, wriggles its rump and buries itself. At no very great depth a spherical cavity is made by pressing back the dusty soil. Here the grub will spend the winter and await the resurrection of the spring. Were I so presumptuous as to advise the Balaninus, better-versed than any one in its business as a Weevil, I should say: ‘To leave your nut now is an act of folly. Later, when the April festival is here and the hazels replace their drooping catkins by the pink pistils of their nascent fruit, well and good; but to-day, in this time of blazing sunshine, which drives the most gallant workers to idleness, what is the use of deserting a home in which you can sleep so comfortably throughout the slack summer season? Where will you find a better lodging than the shell of a hazel-nut when the autumn rains come and the winter frosts? In what more peaceful solitude could the delicate work of the transformation be effected? Besides, the subsoil is full of dangers. It is damp and cold; its roughness makes it painful to the touch for a skin as fine as yours. A formidable enemy lurks there, a cryptogam that implants itself upon any buried larva. In my jars I have great difficulty in protecting the buried larvæ which I am trying to rear. Sooner or later white tufts form upon the glass wall, thread-like fluffs whose lower portion will clasp and drain a poor grub turned into a scrap of plaster: it is the mycelium of one of the Sphæriaceæ whose allotted field of exploitation is the bodies of insects undergoing nymphosis underground. In the nut, a hygienic cell, free from devastating germs, nothing of the sort is to be feared. Why leave it?’