The Professor: Avignon 



I can assert to-day, after a long experience, that 

 only the Social Hymenoptera, the Hive-bees, the 

 Common Wasps, and the Bumble-bees know how 

 to devise a common defence ; and only they dare 

 fall singly upon the aggressor, to wreak an in- 

 dividual vengeance. 



But we would not leave the banks of the 

 " Sunken Road," which have been made clas- 

 sic by Fabre's observations on the Cerceris, 

 the Sitaris and tutti quanti, without letting the 

 reader hear an echo of the heartfelt accents 

 in which the now ageing scientist speaks of 

 these spots which witnessed his first endeav- 

 ours and his first achievements as an ento- 

 mologist, when he returns to them thirty 

 years later to complete his data respecting the 

 Anthophora's parasites: 



Illustrious ravines whose banks are calcined by 

 the sun, if I have in some small degree contributed 

 to your fame, you, in your turn, have afforded me 

 some happy hours of oblivion spent in the joy of 

 learning. You, at least, have never lured me with 

 vain hopes; all that you have promised me you 

 have given me, often a hundredfold. You are my 

 promised land, in which I fain would finally have 

 pitched my observer's tent. It has not been pos- 

 sible to realise my desire. Let me at least salute 

 in passing my beloved insects of other days. 



A wave of the hat to the Tuberculated Cerceris, 

 141 



