70 LEFEBVRE ON MANTIS. 



pendent on rapine and plunder. Where then are the insects so 

 strong as to require such arms for their capture, when, during 

 a week I spent in the desert itself, (out of a month which our 

 excursion lasted,) not one of us could find other insects at the 

 same time as the Eremiaphilas ? 



Not only to myself, but to my companions, who took every 

 pains for me, and to the Arabs whom I employed, especially in 

 zoological research, all investigation proved vain. Unques- 

 tionably, if other insects had existed, the Bedouins of our 

 escort, whom the promise of a reward, worthy of their utmost 

 ambition, (good European powder,) kept constantly on the 

 watch, would not have allowed them to escape ; for we could 

 well trust their eyes, shaded by long lashes, and practised to 

 discover the smallest particle of wheat, powder, or dourrah, 

 which chance throws before them. I am therefore almost 

 tempted to believe that in the places where I found the 

 Eremiaphilce no other insects could have existed. 



On the other hand, the elytra, half petiolated, small and 

 patelliform in their greatest development, in these Orthoptera, 

 and the wings equally unadapted to flight, forbid the idea that, 

 like the Acridiens, they can make distant excursions, reach 

 the cultivated lands, there feed, and then return to the deserts. 

 It is equally impossible to believe that their claws, useless 

 for leaping, should be sufficiently powerful locomotives to 

 transport them to such distances. Besides their quiet, soli- 

 tary habits, and apparent want of the disposition to wander, 

 render such excursions improbable. It is true that the 

 wind, as at sea, blows constantly, and in every direction, over 

 these burning tracts, rolling the sands like waves to a dis- 

 tance ; but as I have never found these insects except in the 

 desert, and as they disappeared when I approached vegetation, 

 every thing tends to the belief that it is not the ordinary hurri- 

 canes of these districts which transport them by accident, but that 

 the desert is their dwelling-place, and that they never leave it. 

 In spite of the extreme facility with which certain insects 

 support a long abstinence, we can hardly imagine that the 

 Eremiaphilce have no other nourishment than what the wind 

 may carry into the desert from the cultivated lands. This 

 precarious existence, of which the spiders, ant-lions, &c. 

 may serve as an example, cannot be reasonably admitted here 

 as a law of nature ; neither can I suppose that she has destined 



