CHAPTER X 



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 ca- 

 pacity for progress, 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 metamorphoses, 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. pauper ata, Latr.), the 

 subject of this chapter. 



Her larva is certainly the strangest crea- 

 ture among the terrestrial fauna of Pro- 



191 



