without allowing herself to be approached.  At last the female holds herself completely motionless, and then the male approaches, seizes her, places her on her side, sometimes carrying her to a more suitable part of the web.  Then one of his copulative apparatus is applied to the female genital opening, and copulation begins.  When completed (on an average in about two hours) the male withdraws his copulatory palpus and turns over the female, who is still inert, on to her other side, then brings his second copulatory apparatus to the female opening and starts afresh.  When the process is definitely completed the male leaves the female, suddenly retiring to a little distance.  The female, who had remained completely motionless for four hours, suddenly runs after the male.  But she only pursues him for a short distance, and the two spiders remain together without any danger to either.  Lecaillon disbelieves the statement of Romanes (in his Animal Intelligence) that the female eats the male after copulation.  But this certainly seems to occur sometimes among insects, as illustrated by the following instance described by so careful an observer of insects as Fabre.

The Mantis religiosa is described by Fabre as contemplating the female for a long time in an attitude of ecstasy.  She remains still and seems indifferent.  He is small and she is large.  At last he approaches; spreads his wings, which tremble convulsively; leaps on her back, and fixes himself there.  The preludes are long and the coupling itself sometimes occupies five or six hours.  Then they separate.  But the same day or the following day she seizes him and eats him up in small mouthfuls.  She will permit a whole series of males to have intercourse with her, always eating them up directly afterward.  Fabre has even seen her eating the male while still on her back, his head and neck gone, but his body still firmly attached. (J.H.  Fabre, Souvenirs Entomologiques, fifth series, p. 307.) Fabre also describes in great detail (ibid., ninth series, chs. xxi-xxii) the sexual parades of the Languedoc scorpion (Scorpio occitanus), an arachnid.  These parades are in public; for their subsequent intercourse the couple seek complete seclusion, and the female finally eats the male.

An insect (a species of Empis) has been described which excites the female by manipulating a large balloon.  “This is of elliptical shape, about seven millimeters long (nearly twice as long as the fly), hollow, and composed entirely of a single layer of minute bubbles, nearly uniform in size, arranged in regular circles concentric with the axis of the structure.  The beautiful, glistening whiteness of the object when the sun shines upon it makes it very conspicuous.  The bubbles were slightly viscid, and in nearly every case there was a small fly pressed into the front end of the balloon, apparently as food for the Empis.  In all cases they were