The third tribe had a great surprise in store for me. The red Crioceris fed, though with a very scornful tooth, on the foliage of the asparagus, the favourite dish of the Field Crioceris and the Twelve-spotted Crioceris. On the other hand, she feasted rapturously on the lily of the valley (_Convallaria maialis_) and on Solomon's seal (_Polygonatum vulgare_), both of which are so different from the lily to any eye untrained in the niceties of botanical analysis.
She did more: she browsed, with every appearance of a contented stomach, on a prickly creeper, _Smilax aspera_, which tangles itself in the hedges with its corkscrew tendrils and produces, in the autumn, graceful clusters of small red berries, which are used for Christmas decorations. The fully-developed leaves are too hard for her, too tough; she wants the tender tips of the nascent foliage. When I take this precaution, I can feed her on the intractable vine as readily as on the lily.
The fact that the smilax is accepted gives me confidence in the prickly butcher's-broom (_Ruscus aculeatus_), another shrub of sturdy constitution, admitted to the family rejoicings at Christmas because of its handsome green leaves and its red berries, which are like big coral beads. In order not to discourage the consumer with leaves that are too hard, I select some young seedlings, newly sprouted and still bearing the round berry, the nutritive gourd, hanging at their base. My precautions lead to nothing: the insect obstinately refuses the butcher's-broom, on which I thought that I might rely after the smilax had been accepted.
We have our botany; the Crioceris has hers, which is subtler in its appreciation of affinities. Her domain comprises two very natural groups, that of the lily and that of the smilax, which, with the advance of science, has become the family of the Smilaceæ. In these two groups she recognizes certain genera--the more numerous--as her own; she refuses the others, which ought perhaps to be revised before being finally classified.
An exclusive taste for the asparagus, one of the foremost representatives of the Smilaceæ, characterizes the two other Crioceres, those eager exploiters of the cultivated asparagus. I find them also pretty often on the needle-leaved asparagus (_A. acutifolius_), a forbidding-looking shrub with long, flexible stems bearing many branches, which the Provençal vine-grower uses, under the name of _roumiéu_, as a filter before the tap of the wine-vat, to prevent the refuse of the grapes from choking up the vent-hole. Apart from these two plants, the two Crioceres refuse absolutely everything, even when in July they come up from the earth with the famishing stomachs which the long fast of the metamorphosis has given them. On the same wild asparagus, disdainful of the rest, lives a fourth Crioceris (_C. paracenthesia_), the smallest of the group. I do not know enough of her habits to say anything more about her.