Therefore the method of installing the family is quite different. Here we see no ingenious preparations, such as the Balanini, the Larini and the Rhynchites showed us. Having no probe among her tools, the mother scatters her eggs in the open, with no protection against the heat of the sun or the inclemencies of the weather. Nothing could be simpler and nothing more dangerous to the germs, in the absence of a special constitution made to withstand the alternate trials of heat and cold, drought and wet. In the mild sunshine of ten o’clock in the morning, the mother, with a jerky, capricious, unmethodical step, runs up and down the chosen pod, first on one and then on the other surface. She protrudes at every instant a short oviscapt, which swings right and left as though to scrape the skin. An egg follows and is abandoned as soon as laid. A hasty touch of the oviscapt, first here, then there, on the green skin of the pea-pod; and that is all. The germ is left there, unprotected, right in the sun. Nor is any choice of site made, to assist the coming grub and shorten its quest when it has to make its way unaided into the larder. There are eggs placed on the swellings created by the peas; there are just as many in the barren dividing valleys. It is for the grub to take its bearings accordingly. In short, the Bruchus’ eggs are laid anyhow, as though sown on the wing. A more serious flaw: the number of eggs confided to one pod is not in proportion to that of the peas contained in it. Let us first realize that each grub needs a ration of one pea, an obligatory ration, amply sufficient for the welfare of one larva, but not big enough for several consumers, nor even for two. A pea for each grub, no more and no less, is the invariable rule. Procreative economy would therefore demand that the mother, familiar with the pod which she has just explored, should, when emitting her germs, more or less limit their number to that of the peas which it contains. Now there is no limit. To a single ration the impetuous ovaries always offer a multiplicity of consumers. My notes are unanimous on this point. The number of eggs laid on a pod always exceeds, and often in a scandalous fashion, the number of peas available. However scanty the food-wallet may be, the guests are superabundant. Dividing the number of eggs perceived on a given pod by that of the peas inside it, I find from five to eight claimants for each pea; I find as many as ten; and there is nothing to tell me that the prodigality does not go farther still. Many are called, but few are chosen! Why all these supernumeraries, who are necessarily excluded from the banquet for want of space? The eggs are a fairly bright amber-yellow, cylindrical in form, smooth and rounded at both ends. They are a millimetre long at most. [57] Each of them is fixed to the pod by a thin network of threads of coagulated albumen. Neither the rain nor the wind can loosen their hold.