Page:The Life of the Spider.djvu/21

Preface bestow on each of them a hurried epithet, in the manner of old Homer. Shall I mention, for instance, the Leucospis, a parasite of the Mason-bee, who, to slay his brothers and sisters in their cradle, arms himself with a horn helmet and a barbed breastplate, which he doffs immediately after the extermination, the safeguard of a hideous right of primogeniture? Shall I tell of the marvellous anatomical knowledge of the Tachytes, of the Cerceris, of the Ammophila, of the Languedocian Sphex, who, according as they wish to paralyze or to kill their prey or their adversary, know exactly, without ever blundering, which nerve-centre to strike with their sting or their mandibles? Shall I speak of the art of the Eumenes, who transforms her stronghold into a complete museum adorned with shells and grains of translucent quartz; of the magnificent metamorphosis of the Pachytilus cinarescens; of the musical instrument owned by the Cricket, whose bow numbers one hundred and fifty triangular prisms that set in motion simultaneously the four dulcimers of the elytron? Shall I sing the fairy-like birth of the nymphs of the Anthophagus, a transparent monster, with a 17