The white-fronted dectic is, like all the locustians (grass-hoppers), a very ancient insect; it existed in the coal era, and it is perhaps this antiquity which explains its peculiar fecundative method. As the cephalopodes, his contemporaries, he has recourse to the spermatophore; yet there is mating, there is embracing; there are even play and caresses. Here are the couple face to face, they caress each other with long antennæ "fine as hair," as Fabre says; after a moment they separate. The next day, new encounter, new blandishments. Another day, and Fabre finds the male knocked down by the female, who overwhelms him with her embrace; he gnaws her belly. The male disentangles himself and escapes, but a new assault masters him, he lies flat on his back. This time the female, lifted on her high legs, holds him belly to belly; she bends back the extremity of her abdomen; the victim does likewise; there is junction, and soon one sees something enormous issue from the convulsive flanks of the male, as if the animal were pushing out its entrails. "It is," continues the best observer (Fabre, Souvenirs VI), "an opaline leather bottle about the size and colour of a mistletoe berry," a bottle with four pockets at least, held together by feeble sutures. The female receives this leather bottle, or spermatophore, and carries it off glued to her belly. Having got over the thunder-clap, the male gets up, makes his toilet; the female browses as she walks. "From time to time she rises on her stilts, bends into a ring, seizes her opaline bundle in her mandibles, and chews it gently." She breaks off little pieces, chews them carefully, and swallows them. Thus while the fecundative particles are extravasated toward the eggs which they are to animate, the female devours the spermatic pouch. After having tasted it piece by piece she suddenly pulls it off, kneads it, swallows it whole. Not a scrap is lost; the place is clear, and the oviscapte is cleaned, washed, polished. The male has begun to sing again, during this meal, but it is not a love-song, he is about to die; he dies: passing near him at this moment, the female looks at him, smells him, takes a bite of his thigh.