Note 1 — Chapter vii · THE POPLAR-WEEVIL

That stiletto-thrust represents, though much less scientifically, the prick of the Hunting Wasp’s sting.1 The latter wants for her offspring a prey now dead, now paralysed: she knows, with the thoroughness of a consummate anatomist, at what points it behoves her to insert her lancet to procure either sudden death or merely a suppression of movement. The Rhynchites requires for hers a leaf rendered flexible, half-alive, in a sense paralysed, which can be easily fashioned into a cylinder; she is perfectly familiar with the little leaf-stalk, the petiole, in which the vessels that disperse the energy of the foliage are gathered in a tiny bundle; and she inserts her drill here, here only and never elsewhere. Thus at one blow, without much trouble, she effects the ruin of the aqueduct. Where can the long-nosed insect have learnt her clever trick of draining springs?