and fatigue, I have the very greatest difficulty in finding the
infinitesimal creature, though I know exactly where it lies. Then
how could I see the egg, worn out as I was under the sun-baked
cliff, how discover the precise spot of a laying performed in a
moment by an insect seen only at a distance? In the painful
conditions wherein I found myself, failure was inevitable.

Despite my negative attempts, therefore, I remain convinced that
the Anthrax flies strew their eggs one by one, on the spots
frequented by those bees who suit their grubs. Each of their
sudden strokes with the tip of the abdomen represents a laying.
They take no precaution to place the germ under cover; for that
matter, any such precaution would be rendered impossible by the
mother's structure. The egg, that delicate object, is laid roughly
in the blazing sun, between grains of sand, in some wrinkle of the
calcined chalk. That summary installation is sufficient, provided
the coveted larva be near at hand. It is for the young grub now to
manage as best it can at its own risk and peril.

Though the sunken roads of the Legue did not tell me all that I
wished to know, they at least made it very probable that the coming
grub must reach the victualled cell by its own efforts. But the
grub which we know, the one that drains the bag of fat which may be
a Chalicodoma larva or an Osmia larva, cannot move from its place,
still less indulge in journeys of discovery through the thickness
of a wall and the web of a cocoon. So an imperative necessity
presents itself: there must perforce be an initial larva form,
capable of moving and organized for searching, a form under which
the grub would attain its end. The Anthrax would thus possess two
larval states: one to penetrate to the provisions; the other to