130 THE INDUSTRIES OF ANIMALS. 



As already mentioned, several facts enable us to 

 recognise that the Cricket is by no means dead. 

 It is simply incapable of movement, as would happen 

 after an injection of curare. This poison kills a 

 superior animal, for it hinders the muscular move- 

 ments of the chest and diaphragm, necessary to 

 respiration ; but if a frog, which can breathe through 

 its skin, is thus acted on it comes to life again at the 

 end of twenty-four or forty-eight hours if the dose 

 has not been too strong. The cricket is in a similar 

 condition; it neither eats nor breathes; being in- 

 capable also of movement, there is no vital expendi- 

 ture ; it remains in a sort of torpor, or latent life, 

 awaiting the tragic fate that is reserved for it. When 

 it has been deposited in the little mortuary chamber 

 the Sphex lays an e.^^ on its thorax. The larva will 

 soon come out to penetrate the body of the prey by 

 enlarging the hole left by the sting. It thus finds 

 for its first meals a food which unites the flavour 

 of living flesh with the immobility of death. Nothing 

 can be more convenient. When the first body is 

 eaten it proceeds to the second, and thus devours 

 successively the four victims stored up by maternal 

 foresight. 



In order not to interrupt the description and inter- 

 fere with the succession of the acts, I have passed 

 without remark the experiment in which Fabre 

 substituted a living animal for the Sphexs already 

 paralysed captive. It seems to me, however, that in 

 this circumstance the insect showed judgment, and 

 knew how to act in accordance with new require- 

 ments. It was evidently the first time in insect 

 memory in which so surprising a phenomenon had 

 been seen as a victim at the last moment again taking 



