xxviii The Life of the Spider 



But the Mantis, the ecstatic insect with the 

 arms always raised in an attitude of supreme 

 invocation, the horrible Mantis religiosa or 

 Praying Mantis, does better still : she eats her 

 husbands (for the insatiable creature sometimes 

 consumes seven or eight in succession), while 

 they strain her passionately to their heart. 

 Her inconceivable kisses devour, not meta- 

 phorically, but in an appallingly real fashion, 

 the ill-fated choice of her soul or her stomach. 

 She begins with the head, goes down to the 

 thorax, nor stops till she comes to the 

 hind-legs, which she deems too tough. She 

 then pushes away the unfortunate remains, 

 while a new lover, who was quietly awaiting 

 the end of the monstrous banquet, heroically 

 steps forward to undergo the same fate. 



J. H. Fabre is indeed the revealer of this new 

 world, for, strange as the admission may seem 

 at a time when we think that we know all that 

 surrounds us, most of those insects minutely 

 described in the vocabularies, learnedly classified 

 and barbarously christened had hardly ever 

 been observed in real life or thoroughly investi- 

 gated, in all the phases of their brief and 

 evasive appearances. He has devoted to sur- 



