The Sphex plunges her dagger three times into the breast of the cricket, because she knows, by an intuition that we cannot comprehend, that the locomotor innervation of the cricket is actuated by three nervous centres, which lie wide apart. [(7/37.)]
Finally, the Ammophila, "the highest manifestation of the logic of instinct, whose profound knowledge leaves us confounded, stabs the caterpillar in nine places, because the body of the victim with which it feeds its larvae is a series of rings, set end to end, each of which possesses its little independent nervous centre." [(7/38.)]
This is not all; the genius of the Sphex is not yet at the end of its foresight. You have doubtless heard of the comatose state into which the wounded fall when, after a fracture of the skull, the brain is compressed by a violent haemorrhage or a bony splinter. The physiologists imitate this process of nature when they wish, for example, to obtain, in animals under experiment, a state of complete immobility. But did the first surgeon who thought of trepanning the skull in order to exert on the brain, by means of a sponge, a certain degree of compression, ever imagine that an analogous procedure had long been employed in the insect world, and that these clumsy methods were merely child's play beside the astonishing feats of the Unconscious?
For the stab in the thoracic ganglions, however efficacious, is often insufficient. Although the six limbs are paralysed, although the victim cannot move, its mandibles, "pointed, sharp, serrated, which close like a pair of scissors, still remain a menace to the tyrant; they might at least, by gripping the surrounding grasses, oppose a more or less effectual resistance to the process of carrying off." So the preceding manoeuvres are consummated by a kind of garrotting; that is, the insect "takes care to compress the brain of its victim, but so as to avoid wounding it; producing only a stupor, a simple torpor, a passing lethargy." Is not the ingenious observer justified in concluding that "this is alarmingly scientific"?
Between the dry statements of Dufour, which served Fabre as his original theme, and the unaccustomed wealth of this vast physiological poetry, what a distance has been covered!
How far have we outstripped this barren matter, these shapeless sketches! Dufour, another solitary, who retired to his province, in the depth of the Landes, was above all a descriptive anatomist, and he limited himself to an inventory of the nest of a Cerceris.
For him the Buprestes were dead, and their state of preservation was explained simply as a kind of embalming, due to some special action of the venom of the Hymenoptera.
These facts, therefore, were stated as simple curiosities.
Fabre proved that these victims possessed all the attributes of life excepting movement, by provoking contractions in their members under the influence of various stimulants, and by keeping them alive artificially for an indefinite period.
On the other hand, he demonstrated the comparative innocuousness of the venom of these wasps, some of which, like the great Cerceris or the beautiful and formidable Scolia, alarm by their enormous size and their terrifying aspect; so that the conservation of the prey could not be due to any occult quality, to some more or less active antiseptic virtue of the venomous fluid, but simply to the precision of the stab and the miraculous deftness of the "surgeon."