This is one step gained.  The murderer chooses the point below the chin as the point of attack, in order to reach the principal centres of innervation, the cephalic ganglions, and thus to abolish life at a single blow.  The vital centres being poisoned, immediate death must follow.  If the object of the Philanthus were merely to cause paralysis she would plunge her sting into the defective corselet, as does the Cerceris in attacking the weevil, whose armour is quite unlike the bee’s.  Her aim is to kill outright, as we shall presently see; she wants a corpse, not a paralytic.  We must admit that her technique is admirable; our human murderers could do no better.

Her posture of attack, which is very different to that of the paralysers, is infallibly fatal to the victim.  Whether she delivers the attack in the erect position or prone, she holds the bee before her, head to head and thorax to thorax.  In this position it suffices to flex the abdomen in order to reach the joint of the neck, and to plunge the sting obliquely upwards into the head of the captive.  If the bee were seized in the inverse position, or if the sting were to go slightly astray, the results would be totally different; the sting, penetrating the bee in a downward direction, would poison the first thoracic ganglion and provoke a partial paralysis only.  What art, to destroy a miserable bee!  In what fencing-school did the slayer learn that terrible upward thrust beneath the chin?  And as she has learned it, how is it that her victim, so learned in matters of architecture, so conversant with the politics of Socialism, has so far learned nothing in her own defence?  As vigorous as the aggressor, she also carries a rapier, which is even more formidable and more painful in its results—­at all events, when my finger is the victim!  For centuries and centuries Philanthus has stored her cellars with the corpses of bees, yet the innocent victim submits, and the annual decimation of her race has not taught her how to deliver herself from the scourge by a well-directed thrust.  I am afraid I shall never succeed in understanding how it is that the assailant has acquired her genius for sudden murder while the assailed, better armed and no less powerful, uses her dagger at random, and so far without effect.  If the one has learned something from the prolonged exercise of the attack, then the other should also have learned something from the prolonged exercise of defence, for attack and defence are of equal significance in the struggle for life.  Among the theorists of our day, is there any so far-sighted as to be able to solve this enigma?