The Mantis: her Love-making 



Eating the lover after consummation of 

 marriage, making a meal of the exhausted 

 dwarf, henceforth good for nothing, can be 

 understood, to some extent, in the insect 

 world, which has no great scruples in mat- 

 ters of sentiment; but gobbling him up dur- 

 ing the act goes beyond the wildest dreams 

 of the most horrible imagination. I have 

 seen it done with my own eyes and have not 

 yet recovered from my astonishment. 



Was this one able to escape and get out of 

 the way, caught as he was in the midst of his 

 duty? Certainly not Hence we must infer 

 that the loves of the Mantis are tragic, 

 quite as much as the Spider's and perhaps 

 even more so. I admit that the restricted 

 space inside the cages favours the slaughter 

 of the males; but the cause of these mas- 

 sacres lies elsewhere. 



Perhaps it is a relic of the palaeozoic ages, 

 when, in the carboniferous period, the in- 

 sect came into being as the result of mon- 

 strous amours. The Orthoptera, to whom 

 the Mantes belong, are the first-born of the 

 entomological world. Rough-hewn, incom- 

 plete in their transformation, they roamed 

 among the arborescent ferns and were al- 

 ready flourishing when none of the insects 

 i45 



