The Life of the Weevil 
endowed with a probe which makes its way 
through the Chalicodoma’s* masonry and 
slips the egg into the cocoon of the fat, sleepy 
larva; but this Weevil of ours has none of 
these rapiers, daggers or larding-pins; she 
has nothing at the tip of her abdomen, ab- 
solutely nothing. And yet she has but to 
apply that tip to the narrow opening of the 
well for the egg to be lodged, Porstiypithy at 
the very bottom. 
Anatomy will supply the key to the riddle, 
which is otherwise undecipherable. I open 
the mother’s abdomen. What meets my 
eyes astounds me. ‘There is here, occupying 
the whole length of the body, an extraor- 
dinary piece of mechanism, a stiff, red, horny 
rod, I was almost saying a rostrum, so closely 
does it resemble that of the head. It is a 
tube, slender as a horse-hair, widening 
slightly like a blunderbuss at the free end 
and swollen like an egg-shaped capsule at 
the base. 
This is the laying-tool, equalling the brad- 
1 The Life of the Grasshopper: chap. xiv——Translator’s 
Note. 
2The Mason-bee. Cf. The Mason-bees: passim — 
Translator’s Note. 
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