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Oran. He surprised a Yellow-winged Sphex 

 dragging an Acridian along. Was it an acci- 

 dental case, like that which I witnessed on the 

 banks of the Rhone ? Was it an exception or 

 the rule ? Can there be a lack of Crickets in 

 the country around Oran and does the Wasp 

 fill their place with Acridians ? The force of 

 circumstances compels me to put the question 

 without finding a reply. 



This is the place to interpolate a certain 

 passage from Lacordaire's ^ Introduction to Ento- 

 mology against which I am eager to protest. 

 Here it is : 



' Darwin,^ who wrote a book on purpose to 

 prove the identity of the intellectual principle 



1 Jean Theodore Lacordaire (1801-1870), professor at the uni- 

 versity of Liege from 1835, author oi Les Genera des colcopteres, in 

 twelve volumes, and of the Introduction a fentomologie quoted 

 above (1837-1839). — Translator's Note. 



2 Erasmus Darwin (i 731- 1802), the poet and naturalist, grand- 

 father of Charles Robert Darwin. The book from which the above 

 passage is quoted is Zoono7ina^ or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794- 

 1796) ; but the reader will note that the author withdraws these 

 comments in a later essay (cf. The Mason-bees, by J. Henri Fabre, 

 translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos : chap, vii.), where he 

 explains that they are due to a misquotation or mistranslation made 

 by Lacordaire, who wrote 'a Sphex ' where Darwin, as his grandson 

 pointed out to Fabre, had written 'a Wasp,' meaning the Common 

 or Social Wasp. It was open to me to suppress this part of the 

 chapter ; but, in that case, there would have been so little left of 

 the original and so small an excuse for the title that I might as 

 readily have suppressed the whole chapter, a liberty which I did 



