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THE EMPUSA.
The sea, life's first foster-mother, still preserves in her depths many of those singular and incongruous shapes which were the earliest attempts of the animal kingdom; the land, less fruitful, but with more capacity for progress, has almost wholly lost the strange forms of other days.

The few that remain belong especially to the series of primitive insects, insects exceedingly limited in their industrial powers and subject to very summary metamorphoses, if to any at all.

In my district, in the front rank of those entomological anomalies which remind us of the denizens of the old coal-forests, stand the Mantidae, including the Praying Mantis, so curious in habits and structure.

Here also is the Empusa (E.pauperata, Latr.), the subject of this chapter.
Her larva is certainly the strangest creature among the terrestrial fauna of Provence: a slim, swaying thing of so fantastic an appearance that uninitiated fingers dare not lay hold of it.