CHAPTER III 



THE EMPUSA 



THE sea, life's first foster-mother, still preserves in her 

 depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes 

 which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom ; 

 the land, less fruitful, but with more capacity for prog- 

 ress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of other 

 days. The few that remain belong especially to the series 

 of primitive insects, insects exceedingly limited in their 

 industrial powers and subject to very summary metamor- 

 phoses, if to any at all. In my district, in the front rank 

 of those entomological anomalies which remind us of the 

 denizens of the old coal-forests, stand the Mantidae, 

 including the Praying Mantis, so curious in habits and 

 structure. Here also is the Empusa (E. pauperata, 

 Latr.), the subject of this chapter. 



Her larva is certainly the strangest creature among 

 the terrestrial fauna of Provence : a slim swaying thing 

 of so fantastic an appearance that uninitiated fingers dare 

 not lay hold of it. The children of my neighborhood, 

 impressed by its startling shape, call it " the Devilkin." 

 In their imaginations, the queer little creature savors of 

 witchcraft. One comes across it, though always sparsely, 

 in spring, up to May; in autumn; and sometimes in 

 winter, if the sun be strong. The tough grasses of the 

 waste-lands, the stunted bushes which catch the sun and 

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