Nor do their domestic habits differ. While the mother is patiently rolling her cylinder, the father remains close at hand, on the same leaf. He looks on. Next, he comes running along in a hurry, takes his stand in the crease and kindly lends the assistance of his grappling-irons. But he again is not a very diligent helper. His brief collaboration is a pretext to tease the worker and achieve his ends by sheer persistence. He retires satisfied. Let us watch him. Before the roll is finished, we shall see him return many times, inspired by the same intentions, which are rarely scorned. I need not insist further on these pairings, which are repeated indefinitely and run counter to the classic data on one of the nicest points of insect physiology. To impress the seal of life upon the hundreds of eggs of the mother Bombyx, [43] or the thirty thousand or more of the mother Bee, the father exerts only one direct intervention. The Weevil claims the privilege of intervening for almost every egg. I leave the curious problem to the experts. Let us unroll a recently-made cigar. The eggs, fine, amber-coloured beads, are scattered, one by one, at very different depths in the spiral. As a rule, I find several, from five to eight. The multiplicity of fellow-feasters, in both the rolled poplar-leaf and the rolled vine-leaf, bears witness to extreme frugality. The two leaf-rollers are quickly hatched: the grub is born in five or six days’ time. Then the observer begins to be faced with the same difficulties that beset a prentice hand in the rearing of larvæ; and these difficulties are all the more exasperating in that there was nothing to predict them. The course to be followed here seems indeed so very simple. Since the rolled leaves are at the same time board and lodging, we have but to pick them, from the vine and the poplar respectively, and to place them in the glass jars, whence we can take them at such times as we consider suitable. What used to be effected in the open air, amid the disturbances of the atmosphere, will be effected all the better in the peaceful shelter of the glass. There can be no doubt, therefore, of an easy success. But what is this? From time to time I unroll a few cigars to ascertain the state of their contents. What I see fills me with anxiety for the fate of my baby-farm. The young larvæ are very far from thriving. I find some of them languishing and emaciated, shrivelling into a wrinkled ball; I find some of them dead. Vainly I possess myself in patience: the weeks go by and not one of my grubs grows or gives a sign of energy. From day to day my two colonies dwindle until they consist wholly of dying larvæ. When July comes, there is not a living thing left in my glass jars.