J. Perez, who failed to recognize her. This species may well be new to our
fauna. I confine myself to calling her the Mantis-killing Tachytes and
leave to the specialists the task of adorning her with a Latin name, if it
be really the fact that the Wasp is not yet catalogued. I will be brief in
my delineation. To my thinking the best description is this: mantis-hunter.
With this information it is impossible to mistake the insect, in my
district of course. I may add that it is black, with the first two
abdominal segments, the legs and the tarsi a rusty red. Clad in the same
livery and much smaller than the female, the male is remarkable for his
eyes, which are of a beautiful lemon-yellow when he is alive. The length is
nearly half an inch for the female and a little more than half this for the
male.--Author's Note.) I do not think that she is very widely distributed.
I made her acquaintance in the Serignan woods, where she inhabits, or
rather used to inhabit--for I fear that I have depopulated and even
destroyed the community by my repeated excavations--where she used to
inhabit one of those little mounds of sand which the wind heaps up against
the rosemary clumps. Outside this small community, I never saw her again.
Her history, rich in incident, will be given with all the detail which it
deserves. I will confine myself for the moment to mentioning her rations,
which consist of Mantis-larvae, those of the Praying Mantis predominating.
(Cf. "The Life of the Grasshopper": chapters 6 to 9.--Translator's Note.)
My lists record from three to sixteen heads for each cell. Once again we
note a great inequality of rations, the reason for which we must try to
discover.

What shall I say of the Black Tachytes (T. nigra, VAN DER LIND) that I have
not already said in telling the story of the Yellow-winged Sphex? ("The
Hunting Wasps": chapters 4 to 6.--Translator's Note.) I have there
described her contests with the Sphex, whose burrow she seems to me to have
usurped; I show her dragging along the ruts in the roads a paralysed