The sight that greets my eyes a fortnight later is conclusive. My tubes contain only a horrible mess of corpses. Evaporation was impossible; no fresh air came to cleanse the premises and vivify the larvæ and nymphs; and all have perished, all have become putrid. The casket of the sloe, despite its air-tight condition, is not so close a receptacle as my glass prisons. Gaseous exchanges are effected, since the kernel, itself a living body, continues to thrive. But what suffices to maintain the life of a seed must be insufficient for the much more active life of the insect. The larva of the Weevil, during the few weeks which it spends nibbling its kernel, would thus be in great jeopardy if it had no other resources for breathing than the air in the sloe-stone, so limited in quantity and so scantily renewed. Everything seems to prove that if the air-hole, the work of its chisel, were to be plugged with a drop of gum, the recluse would perish, or at least drag out a languishing existence and would be incapable of migrating underground at the proper time. This suspicion is worth confirming. I therefore prepare a handful of sloes; I myself bring about what would have happened naturally but for the mother’s precautions. I deluge the crater and its central cone with a drop of thick solution of gum arabic. My sticky preparation takes the place of the product of the sloe-bush. The drop hardens; I add others until the top of the cone disappears in the thickness of the varnish. As for the rest of the fruit, I leave it as it was. This done, let us wait, but leave the sloes in the open air, as they are, on the bush. There the gummy concretions will not grow soft—which would not fail to happen in a glass jar—merely by means of the moisture supplied by the fruits themselves. By the end of July, the sloes left in their natural state give me the first emigrants; the exodus goes on through part of August. The means of exit is a round hole, very cleanly cut, similar to that made by the Nut-weevil. Just like the grub of the last-named, the emigrant passes itself through the draw-plate and releases itself by a feat of gymnastics in which it dilates the part of the body already extracted with the humours forced out of the part still imprisoned. The exit-door is sometimes one with the narrow entrance; more often it is beside it; but it is never, absolutely never, outside the bare space that forms the bottom of the crater. The grub seems to loathe finding the soft pulp of the sloe in front of its mandibles. Admirably adapted for chiselling hard wood, the tool would perhaps become clogged in a sticky mess. This needs a spoon to remove it, not a gouge. At all events, the exit is always made at some point of the floor thoroughly cleaned by the mother, where there is neither gum nor fleshy pulp to hamper the proper working of the tool.