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One learns to sacrifice one's feelings in the cause of science, but to the last it was a real distress to me to have to put the poor little ants where they would be devoured; but Nature is cruel, and from the real lion to his insect namesake, preying upon one another seems the prevailing law of her realm. As the ant-lions grew, the pits increased in size.

There were the rain-washed gullies, the half-roofed entrances to the vast underground fortresses, clean-swept, perfect roads, as efficient as the arteries of Verdun, flapping dead leaves like the omnipresent, worn-out scare-crows of camouflage, and over in one corner, to complete the simile, were a dozen shell-holes, the homes of voracious ant-lions, which, for passing insects, were unexploded mines, set at hair trigger.

For the same cause for which a molehill is like a cone, though a very rough one; and that the little heaps which the burrowing beetles make on the moor, or which the ant-lions in France make in the sand, are all something in the shape of a cone, with a hole like a crater in the middle. What the beetle and the ant-lion do on a very little scale, the steam inside the earth does on a great scale.

By day or night no ant or other edible thing seemed ever to approach or be entrapped; and month after month there was no sign of change to imago. Yet each pit held a fat, enthusiastic inmate, ready at a touch to turn steam-shovel, battering-ram, bayonet, and gourmand. Among the first thousand-and-one mysteries of Kartabo I give a place to the source of nourishment of the sub-bungalow ant-lions.

At first they were about as large as a threepenny-piece, but ended by measuring more than two inches across. I could not tell whether the insect moulted its skin, as it was always hidden, but in July, after four months' feeding, the ant-lions changed into chrysalides, which looked like perfectly round balls of sand.

Bare as our leaf-carpeted bamboo-glade appeared, yet a select little company found life worth living there. The dry sand beneath the house was covered with the pits of ant-lions, and as we watched them month after month, they seemed to have more in common with the grains of quartz which composed their cosmos than with the organic world.

It was one of the Neuroptera insects with wings in which the veins run straight down the wing, sometimes joined by cross branches at right angles. Some of the modern kinds are very beautiful four-winged flies, with bright colours on their wings like butterflies. Others are ant-lions or caddis-flies. The curve of the fragment of wing also suggested its probable size when unbroken.

Ant-lions are not, I believe, found in any part of England, so I had to wait till I could again procure some from the south of France, where they are frequently met with in dry, sandy places. Early in March this year three specimens were sent me and were at once placed in a box of dry silver sand, where they buried themselves and remained quietly resting for some hours.