The son of semi-literate peasant farmers in France’s Massif Central, Jean-Henri Fabre (1823–1915) spent his early years on his grandparents’ remote small-holding, since his parents could not afford to feed him. Starting his education at the village primary school, run by the local barber, he won a bursary to secondary school in Avignon, and became a schoolmaster in Ajaccio, Corsica, where he began to study plants and insects. He was almost entirely self-taught, receiving his only natural history lesson from a biologist who happened to be visiting Corsica and showed him how to dissect a snail.

Back in Avignon, teaching in the grammar school, Fabre made expeditions into the surrounding countryside and would sit motionless for hours watching insects, to the puzzlement of the yokels, who took him for a half-wit. When he was almost 50 years old he gave up schoolmastering and retired to the small village of Sérignan, near Orange. Here in his ‘hermit’s retreat’, living on fruits, vegetables, and a little wine, he observed insects on a tract of stony ground in front of his house, and also in the surrounding plain, with its scrub of wild thyme and lavender, and on the slopes of Mont Ventoux.

His accounts of the creatures he studied – wasps, bees, dung beetles, gnats, spiders, scorpions – grew into the ten-volume Souvenirs entomologiques. Picturesque and informal, and enlivened by allusions to his eight children, the family dog, and other minor characters, these essays established Fabre’s greatness as both poet and scientist. To Victor Hugo he was ‘the insect’s Homer’; to Charles Darwin, an ‘incomparable observer’. A strain of callousness, even cruelty, in his writing, accentuated by his tendency to describe his insects as if they were people, and contrasting curiously with his humour and charm, enhances its dramatic quality.

A turning point in Fabre’s life came when he read a monograph on parasitic wasps by Léon Dufour, which noted how a species of burrowing wasp (Cerceris bupresticida)‚ common in the Landes, placed the bodies of a particular kind of beetle (Buprestis bifasciata) in its burrow for its grubs to feed on when they hatched out. Dufour could not make out why the dead beetles did not decay before the wasp-eggs hatched, and he assumed that the mother wasp must inject them with a preservative. The Sérignan region with its sandy soil was favourable for observing burrowing wasps, and Fabre first directed his attention to a species (Cerceris major) closely related to Dufour’s, which preyed on large weevils. He found that the weevils left in the wasp’s burrow as food were not dead, but paralysed by the mother wasp, which stung them with great accuracy in their thoracic ganglia, and was thus able to leave living food for her grubs. Pricking weevils in the same spot with a fine steel pen dipped in ammonia, Fabre found that he, like the wasp, could induce instant paralysis. Later experiments on other paralysed wasp-victims revealed that they were not only alive but conscious enough to eat, taking drops of sugar solution from the end of a straw.

In the first of the pieces that follow Fabre investigates the food-arrangements of a third species of burrowing wasp, the yellow-winged Sphex (Sphex flavipennis), which preys on crickets. The second piece shows him in less gruesome mood, surprised by moths. In the third, his imagination works on the least promising material, stone.

Wasps

There can be no doubt that the Sphex uses her greatest skill when immolating a cricket; it is therefore very important to explain the method by which the victim is sacrificed. Taught by my numerous attempts to observe the war tactics of the Cerceris, I immediately used on the Sphex the plan already successful with the former, i.e. taking away the prey and replacing it by a living specimen. This exchange is all the easier because the Sphex leaves her victim while she goes down her burrow, and the audacious tameness, which actually allows her to take from your fingertips, or even off your hand, the cricket stolen from her and now offered, conduces most happily to a successful result of the experiment by allowing the details of the drama to be closely observed.

It is easy enough to find living crickets; one has only to lift the first stone, and you find them, crouched and sheltering from the sun. These are the young ones of the current year, with only rudimentary wings, and which, not having the industry of the perfect insect, do not yet know how to dig deep retreats where they would be beyond the investigations of the Sphex. In a few moments I find as many crickets as I could wish, and all my preparations are made. I establish myself on the flat ground in the midst of the Sphex colony and wait.

A huntress comes, conveys her cricket to the mouth of her hole and goes down alone. The cricket is speedily replaced by one of mine, but placed at some distance from the hole. The Sphex returns, looks round, and hurries to seize her too distant prey. I am all attention. Nothing on earth would induce me to give up my part in the drama which I am about to witness. The frightened cricket springs away. The Sphex follows closely, reaches it, darts upon it. Then there is a struggle in the dust when sometimes conqueror, sometimes conquered is uppermost or undermost. Success, equal for a moment, finally crowns the aggressor. In spite of vigorous kicks, in spite of bites from its pincer-like jaws, the cricket is felled and stretched on its back.

The murderess soon makes her arrangements. She places herself body to body with her adversary, but in a reverse position, seizes one of the bands at the end of the cricket’s abdomen and masters with her forefeet the convulsive efforts of its great hind-thighs. At the same moment her intermediate feet squeeze the panting sides of the vanquished cricket, and her hind ones press like two levers on its face, causing the articulation of the neck to gape open. The Sphex then curves her abdomen vertically, so as to offer a convex surface impossible for the mandibles of the cricket to seize, and one beholds, not without emotion, the poisoned lancet plunge once into the victim’s neck, next into the jointing of the two front segments of the thorax, and then again towards the abdomen. In less time than it takes to tell, the murder is committed, and the Sphex, after setting her disordered toilette to rights, prepares to carry off her victim, its limbs still quivering in the death-throes. Let us reflect a moment on the admirable tactics of which I have given a faint sketch. The prey is armed with redoubtable mandibles, capable of disembowelling the aggressor if they can seize her, and a pair of strong feet, actual clubs, furnished with a double row of sharp spines, which can be used alternatively to enable the cricket to bound far away from an enemy or to overturn one by brutal kicks. Accordingly, note what precautions on the part of the Sphex before using her dart. The victim, lying on its back, cannot escape by using its hind levers, for want of anything to spring from, as of course it would were it attacked in its normal position. Its spiny legs, mastered by the fore-feet of the Sphex, cannot be used as offensive weapons, and its mandibles, held at a distance by the wasp’s hind-feet, open threateningly but can seize nothing. But it is not enough for the Sphex to render it impossible for her victim to hurt her: she must hold it so firmly garrotted that no movement can turn the sting from the points where the drop of poison must be instilled, and probably it is in order to hinder any motion of the abdomen that one of the end segments is grasped. If a fertile imagination had had free play to invent a plan of attack it could not have devised anything better, and it is questionable whether the athletes of the classic palestra [wrestling-ground] when grappling an adversary would have assumed attitudes more scientifically calculated.

I have just said that the dart is plunged several times into the victim’s body, once under the neck, then behind the prothorax, lastly near the top of the abdomen. It is in this triple blow that the infallibility, the infused science of instinct, appear in all their magnificence. First let us recall the chief conclusions to which the preceding study of the Cerceris have led us. The victims of Hymenoptera [the group of insects to which wasps belong] whose larva live on prey are not corpses, in spite of entire immobility. There is merely total or partial paralysis, and more or less annihilation of animal life, but vegetative life – that of the nutritive organs – lasts a long while yet, and preserves from decomposition the prey which the larvæ are not to devour for a considerable time. To produce this paralysis the predatory Hymenoptera use just those methods which the advanced science of our day might suggest to the experimental physiologist – namely, wounding, by means of a poisoned dart, those nervous centres which animate the organs of locomotion. We know too that the various centres or ganglia of the nervous chain in articulate animals act to a certain degree independently, so that injury to one only causes, at all events immediately, paralysis of the corresponding segment, and this in proportion as the ganglia are more widely separated and distant from each other. If, on the contrary, they are soldered together, injury to the common centre causes paralysis of all the segments where its ramifications spread. This is the case with Buprestids and Weevils, which the Cerceris paralyses by a single sting, directed at the common mass of the nerve centres in the thorax. But open a cricket, and what do we find to animate the three pairs of feet? We find what the Sphex knew long before the anatomist, three nerve centres far apart. Thence the fine logic of the three stabs. Proud science! humble thyself.

Crickets sacrificed by Sphex flavipennis are no more dead, in spite of all appearances, than are Weevils struck by a Cerceris. If one closely observes a cricket stretched on its back a week or even a fortnight or more after the murder, one sees the abdomen heave strongly at long intervals. Very often one can notice a quiver of the palpi and marked movements in the antennæ and the bands of the abdomen, which separate and then come suddenly together. By putting such crickets into glass tubes I have kept them perfectly fresh for six weeks. Consequently, the Sphex larvæ, which live less than a fortnight before enclosing themselves in their cocoons, are sure of fresh food as long as they care to feast.

The chase is over; the three or four crickets needed to store a cell are heaped methodically on their backs, their heads at the far end, their feet toward the entrance. An egg is laid on each. Then the burrow has to be closed. The sand from the excavation lying heaped before the cell door is promptly swept backward into the passage. From time to time fair-sized bits of gravel are chosen singly, the Sphex scratching in the fragments with her forefeet, and carrying them in her jaws to consolidate the pulverized mass. If none suitable are at hand, she goes to look for them in the neighbourhood, apparently choosing with such scrupulous care as a mason would show in selecting the best stones for a building. Vegetable remains and tiny bits of dead leaf are also employed. In a moment every outward sign of the subterranean dwelling is gone, and if one has not been careful to mark its position, it is impossible for the most attentive eye to find it again. This done, a new burrow is made, provisioned and walled up as soon as the Sphex has eggs to house. Having finished laying, she returns to a careless and vagabond life until the first cold weather ends her well-filled existence …

The egg of Sphex flavipennis is white, elongated, and cylindrical, slightly curved, and measuring three to four millimetres in length. Instead of being laid fortuitously on any part of the victim, it is invariably placed on one spot, across the cricket’s breast – a little on one side, between the first and second pairs of feet. The eggs of the white bordered, and of the Languedocian Sphex occupy a like position … This chosen spot must possess some highly important peculiarity for the security of the young larva, as I have never known it vary.

Hatching takes place at the end of two or three days. A most delicate covering splits, and one sees a feeble maggot, transparent as crystal, somewhat attenuated and even compressed in front, slightly swelled out behind, and adorned on either side by a narrow white band formed by the chief trachea. The feeble creature occupies the same position as the egg; its head is, as it were, engrafted on the same spot where the front end of the egg was fixed, and the remainder of its body rests on the victim without adhering to it. Its transparency allows us readily to perceive rapid fluctuations within its body, undulations following one another with mathematical regularity, and which, beginning in the middle of the body, are impelled, some forward and some backward. These are due to the digestive canal, which imbibes long draughts of the juices drawn from the sides of the victim.

Let us pause a moment before a spectacle so calculated to arrest attention. The prey is laid on its back, motionless. The grub is a lost grub if torn from the spot whence it draws nourishment. Should it fall, all is over, for weak as it is, and without means of locomotion, how would it again find the spot where it should quench its thirst? The merest trifle would enable the victim to get rid of the animalcule gnawing at its entrails, yet the gigantic prey gives itself up without the least sign of protestation. I am well aware that it is paralysed, and has lost the use of its feet from the sting of its assassin, but at this early stage it preserves more or less power of movement and sensation in parts unaffected by the dart. The abdomen palpitates, the mandibles open and shut, the abdominal styles and the antennæ oscillate. What would happen if the grub fixed on one of the spots yet sensitive near the mandibles, or even on the stomach, which, being tenderer and more succulent, would naturally suggest itself as fittest for the first mouthful of the feeble grub? Bitten on the quick parts, the cricket would display at least some shuddering of the skin, which would detach and throw off the minute larva, for which probably all would be over, since it would risk falling into the formidable, pincer-like jaws.

But there is a part of the body where no such peril is to be feared – the thorax wounded by the sting. There and there only can the experimenter on a recent victim dig down the point of a needle – nay, pierce through and through without evoking any sign of pain. And there the egg is invariably laid – there the young larva always attacks its prey. Gnawed where pain is no longer felt, the cricket does not stir. Later, when the wound has reached a sensitive spot, it will move of course as much as it can; but then it is too late – its torpor will be too deep, and besides, its enemy will have gained strength. That is why the egg is always laid on the same spot, near the wounds caused by the sting on the thorax, not in the middle, where the skin might be too thick for the new-born grub, but on one side – toward the junction of the feet, where the skin is much thinner. What a judicious choice! what reasoning on the part of the mother when, underground, in complete darkness, she perceives and utilizes the one suitable spot for her egg!

I have brought up Sphex larvæ by giving them successively crickets taken from cells, and have thus been able, day by day, to follow the rapid progress of my nurslings. The first cricket – that on which the egg is laid – is attacked, as I have already said, toward the point where the dart first struck – between the first and second pairs of legs. At the end of a few days the young larva has hollowed a hole big enough for half its body in the victim’s breast. One may then sometimes see the cricket, bitten to the quick, vainly move its antennæ and abdominal styles, open and close its empty jaws, and even move a foot, but the larva is safe and searches its vitals with impunity. What an awful nightmare for the paralysed cricket! This first ration is consumed in six or seven days; nothing is left but the outer integument, whose every portion remains in place. The larva, whose length is then twelve millimetres, comes out of the body of the cricket through the hole it had made in the thorax. During this operation it moults, and the skin remains caught in the opening. It rests, and then begins on a second ration. Being stronger it has nothing to fear from the feeble movements of the cricket, whose daily increasing torpor has extinguished the last shred of resistance, more than a week having passed since it was wounded; so it is attacked with no precautions, and usually at the stomach, where the juices are richest. Soon comes the turn of the third cricket, then that of the fourth, which is consumed in ten hours. Of these three victims there remains only the horny integument, whose various portions are dismembered one by one and carefully emptied. If a fifth ration be offered, the larva disdains or hardly touches it, not from moderation, but from an imperious necessity.

It should be observed that up to now the larva has ejected no excrement, and that its intestine, in which four crickets have been engulfed, is distended to bursting. Thus, a new ration cannot tempt its gluttony, and henceforward it only thinks about making a silken dwelling. Its repast has lasted from ten to twelve days without a pause. Its length now measures from twenty-five to thirty millimetres, and its greatest width from five to six. Its usual shape, somewhat enlarged behind and narrowed in front, agrees with that general in larvæ of Hymenoptera. It has fourteen segments, including the head, which is very small, with weak mandibles seemingly incapable of the part just played by them. Of these fourteen segments the intermediary ones are provided with stigmata. Its livery is yellowish-white, with countless chalky white dots.

We saw that the larva began on the stomach of the second cricket, this being the most juicy and fattest part. Like a child who first licks off the jam on his bread, and then bites the slice with contemptuous tooth, it goes straight to what is best, the abdominal intestines, leaving the flesh, which must be extracted from its horny sheath, until it can be digested deliberately. But when first hatched it is not thus dainty: it must take the bread first and the jam later, and it has no choice but to bite its first mouthful from the middle of the victim’s chest, exactly where its mother placed the egg. It is rather tougher, but the spot is a secure one, on account of the deep inertia into which three stabs have thrown the thorax. Elsewhere, there would be, generally, if not always, spasmodic convulsions which would detach the feeble thing and expose it to terrible risks amid a heap of victims whose hind legs, toothed like a saw, might occasionally kick, and whose jaws could still grip. Thus it is motives of security, and not the habits of the grub, which determine the mother where to place its egg.

A suspicion suggests itself to me as to this. The first cricket, the ration on which the egg is laid, exposes the grub to more risks than do the others. First, the larva is still a weakly creature; next, the victim was only recently stung, and therefore in the likeliest state for displaying some remains of life. This first cricket has to be as thoroughly paralysed as possible, and therefore it is stabbed three times. But the others, whose torpor deepens as time passes, – the others which the larvæ only attack when grown strong, – have they to be treated as carefully? Might not a single stab, or two, suffice to bring on a gradual paralysis while the grub devours its first allowance? The poison is too precious to be squandered; it is powder and shot for the Sphex, only to be used economically. At all events, if at one time I have been able to see a victim stabbed thrice, at another I have only seen two wounds given. It is true that the quivering point of the Sphex’s abdomen seemed seeking a favourable spot for a third wound; but if really given, it escaped my observation. I incline to believe that the victim destined to be eaten first always is stabbed three times, but that economy causes the others only to be struck twice.

The last cricket being finished, the larva sets to work to spin a cocoon. In less than forty-eight hours the work is completed, and henceforward the skilful worker may yield within an impenetrable shelter to the overpowering lethargy which is stealing over it – a state of being which is neither sleeping nor waking, death nor life, whence it will issue transfigured ten months later.

Moths

Who does not know the magnificent Moth, the largest in Europe, clad in maroon velvet with a necktie of white fur? The wings, with their sprinkling of grey and brown, crossed by a faint zigzag and edged with smoky white, have in the centre a round patch, a great eye with a black pupil and a variegated iris containing successive black, white, chestnut, and purple arcs.

Well, on the morning of the 6th of May [1897], a female emerges from her cocoon in my presence, on the table of my insect laboratory. I forthwith cloister her, still damp with the humours of the hatching, under a wire-gauze bell-jar. For the rest, I cherish no particular plans. I incarcerate her from mere habit, the habit of the observer always on the look-out for what may happen.

It was a lucky thought. At nine o’clock in the evening, just as the household is going to bed, there is a great stir in the room next to mine. Little Paul, half-undressed, is rushing about, jumping and stamping, knocking the chairs over like a mad thing. I hear him call me:

‘Come quick!’ he screams. ‘Come and see these Moths, big as birds! The room is full of them!’

I hurry in. There is enough to justify the child’s enthusiastic and hyperbolical exclamations, an invasion as yet unprecedented in our house, a raid of giant Moths. Four are already caught and lodged in a bird-cage. Others, more numerous, are fluttering on the ceiling.

At this sight, the prisoner of the morning is recalled to my mind.

‘Put on your things, laddie,’ I say to my son. ‘Leave your cage and come with me. We shall see something interesting.’

We run downstairs to go to my study, which occupies the right wing of the house. In the kitchen I find the servant, who is also bewildered by what is happening and stands flicking her apron at great Moths whom she took at first for Bats.

The Great Peacock, it would seem, has taken possession of pretty well every part of the house. What will it be around my prisoner, the cause of this incursion? Luckily, one of the two windows of the study had been left open. The approach is not blocked.

We enter the room, candle in hand. What we see is unforgettable. With a soft flick-flack the great Moths fly around the bell-jar, alight, set off again, come back, fly up to the ceiling and down. They rush at the candle, putting it out with a stroke of their wings; they descend on our shoulders, clinging to our clothes, grazing our faces. The scene suggests a wizard’s cave, with its whirl of Bats. Little Paul holds my hand tighter than usual, to keep up his courage.

How many of them are there? About a score. Add to these the number that have strayed into the kitchen, the nursery, and the other rooms of the house; and the total of those who have arrived from the outside cannot fall far short of forty. As I said, it was a memorable evening, this Great Peacock evening. Coming from every direction and apprised I know not how, here are forty lovers eager to pay their respects to the marriageable bride born that morning amid the mysteries of my study.

Fossils

My very window-ledge, the confidant of bygone ages, talks to me of a vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, each particle of which retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived. Spines of sea-urchins, teeth and vertebrae of fish, broken pieces of shells, shivers of madrepores form a pulp of dead existences. Examined ashlar by ashlar, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a rag-fair of things that were alive in the days of old.

The rocky layer from which building-materials are derived in these parts covers, with its mighty shell, the greater portion of the neighbouring upland. Here the quarry-man has dug for none knows how many centuries, since the time when Agrippa hewed cyclopean flags to form the stages and façade of the Orange theatre. And here, daily, the pick-axe uncovers curious fossils. The most remarkable of these are teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone, bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction!

The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon. The shark of to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant.

Other Squali abound in the same stone, all fierce gullets. It contains Oxyrhinæ (Oxyrhina Xiphodon, Agass.), with teeth shaped like pointed cleavers; Hemipristes (Hemipristis Serra, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with flexuous, steeled daggers, flattened on one side, convex on the other; Notidani (Notidanus Primigenius, Agass.), whose sunk teeth are crowned with radiate indentations.

This dental arsenal tells me how extermination came at all times to lop off the surplus of life; it says:

‘On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a shiver of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with truculent devourers and peaceable victims. A long gulf occupied the future site of the Rhône Valley. Its billows broke at no great distance from your dwelling.’

Here, in fact, are the cliffs of the bank, in such a state of preservation that, on concentrating my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of the waves. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, Petricolæ, Pholaidids have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one’s fist, round cells, cabins with a narrow conduit-pipe through which the recluse received the incoming water, constantly renewed and laden with nourishment. Sometimes, the erstwhile occupant is there, mineralized, intact to the tiniest details of his striæ and scales, a frail ornament; more often, he has disappeared, dissolved, and his house has filled with a fine sea mud, hardened into a chalky kernel.

In this quiet inlet, some eddy has collected and drowned at the bottom of the mire, now turned into marl, enormous heaps of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up oysters a cubit long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could shovel up, in the immense pile, Scallops, Cones, Cytheridæ, Mactridæ, Murices, Turritellidæ, Mitridæ and others too numerous, too innumerable to mention. You stand stupefied before the vital ardour of the days of old, which was able to supply such a pile of relics in a mere nook of earth.

The necropolis of shells tells us, besides, that time, that patient renewer of the order of things, has mown down not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays, the neighbouring sea, the Mediterranean, has almost nothing identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of similarity between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the tropical seas. The climate, therefore, has become colder; the sun is slowly becoming extinguished; the species are dying out. Thus speak the numismatics of the stones on my window-ledge.

Without leaving my field of observation, so modest, so limited and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and, this time, on the subject of the insect. The country round Apt abounds in a strange rock that breaks off in thin plates, similar to sheets of whitish cardboard. It burns with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell; and it was deposited at the bottom of great lakes haunted by crocodiles and giant tortoises. Those lakes no human eye has ever seen. Their basins have been replaced by the ridges of the hills; their muds, peacefully deposited in thin courses, have become mighty banks of rock.

Let us break off a slab and subdivide it into sheets with the point of a knife, a work as easy as separating the superposed layers of a piece of paste-or mill-board. In so doing, we are examining a volume taken from the library of the mountains, we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to the Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams; nay, better: realities converted into pictures.

On this page are fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Back-bones, fins, vertebral links, bones of the head, crystal of the eye turned to a black globule, everything is there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel an inclination to scratch off a bit with our finger and taste this supramillenary preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum.

There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the deficiency. It says to us:

‘These fishes lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly, swells came and asphyxiated them in their mud-thickened waves. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, they have passed through time, will pass through it indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.’

The same swells brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so much so that the lacustrian deposit talks to us also of things on land. It is a general record of the life of the time.

Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves drawn in brown prints. The stone herbal vies in botanical accuracy with a normal herbal. It repeats what the shells had already told us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in former days; it no longer includes palm-trees, camphor-yielding laurels, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions.

Continue to turn the pages. We now come to the insects. The most frequent are the Diptera, of middling size, often very humble flies and gnats. The teeth of the great Squali astonished us by their soft polish amid the roughness of their chalky veinstone. What shall we say of these frail midges preserved intact in their marly shrine? The frail creature, which our fingers could not grasp without crushing it, lies undeformed beneath the weight of the mountains!

The six slender legs, which the least thing is enough to disjoint, here lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape and arrangement, in the attitude of the insect at rest. There is nothing lacking, not even the tiny double claws of the extremities. Here are the two wings, unfurled. The fine net-work of their nervures can be studied under the lens as clearly as in the Dipteron of the collections, stuck upon its pin. The antennary tufts have lost none of their subtle elegance; the belly gives us the number of the rings, edged with a row of atoms that were cilia.

The carcase of a mastodont, defying time in its sandy bed, already astonishes us: a gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.

Certainly, the Mosquito, carried by the rising swells, did not come from far away. Before his arrival, the hurly-burly of a thread of water must have reduced him to that annihilation to which he was so near. He lived on the shores of the lake. Killed by the joys of a morning – the old age of gnats – he fell from the top of his reed, was forthwith drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.

Who are those others, those dumpy ones, with hard, convex elytra, the most numerous next to the Diptera? Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us plainly. They are proboscidian Coleoptera, Rhynchopora, or, in less hard terms, Weevils. There are small ones, middling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.

Their attitudes on the chalky slab are not as correct as those of the Mosquito. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum is at one time hidden under the chest, at another projects forward. Some show it in profile; others – more frequent these – stretch it to one side, as the result of a twist in the neck.

These dislocated, contorted insects did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Dipteron. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants on the banks, the others, the majority, come from the surrounding neighbourhood, brought by the rains, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as branches and stones. A stout armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way to some extent; and the miry winding-sheet received the drowned Beetles as the disorder of the passage left them.

These strangers, come perhaps from afar, supply us with precious information. They tell us that, whereas the banks of the lake had the Mosquito as the chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil.

Outside the snout-carrying family, the sheets of my Apt rock show me hardly anything more, especially in the order of the Coleoptera. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, the Dung-beetle, the Capricorn, which the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvests, would have brought to the lake even as it did the Weevil? There is not the least vestige of those tribes, so prosperous to-day.

Where are the Hydrophilus, the Gyrinus, the Dytiscus, all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had a great chance of coming down to us mummified between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they lived in the lake, whose muds would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more perfectly than the little fishes and especially than the Dipteron. Well, of those aquatic Coleoptera there is no trace either.

Where were they, where were those missing from the geological reliquary? Where were they of the thickets, of the green-sward, of the worm-eaten trunks: Capricorns, borers of wood; Sacred Beetles, workers in dung; Carabi, disembowellers of game? One and all were in the limbo of the time to come. The present of that period did not possess them: the future awaited them. The Weevil, therefore, if I may credit the modest records which I am free to consult, is the oldest of the Coleoptera.

Life, at the start, fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the Saurian, it revelled at first in monsters fifteen and twenty yards long. It placed horns on their noses and eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, hollowed their necks into spiny wallets, wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though not with great success, to give them wings. After these horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down and produced the charming green Lizard of our hedges.

When it invented the bird, it filled its beak with the pointed teeth of the reptile and appended a long, feathered tail unto its rump. These undetermined and revoltingly ugly creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove.

All, these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot’s brain. The brute of antiquity is, first and foremost, an atrocious machine for snapping, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later.

The Weevil, in his fashion, to a certain extent, repeats these aberrations. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut foursquare; elsewhere a crazy reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouthpiece, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on the sides, the antennæ, with their first joints set in a groove.

What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose? Where did the insect find the model? Nowhere. The Weevil is its inventor and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Coleopteron indulges in these buccal eccentricities.

Observe, also the smallness of the head, a bulb that hardly swells beyond the base of the snout. What can it have inside? A very poor nervous equipment, the sign of exceedingly limited instincts. Before seeing them at work, we make small account of these microcephali, in respect of intelligence; we class them among the obtuse, among creatures bereft of working capacity. These surmises will not be very largely upset.

Though the Curculio be but little glorified by his talents, this is no reason for scorning him. As we learn from the lacustrian schists, he was in the van of the insects with the armoured wing-cases; he was long stages ahead of the workers in incubation within the limits of possibility. He speaks to us of primitive forms, sometimes so quaint; he is, in his own little world, what the bird with the toothed jaws and the Saurian with the horned eyebrows are in a higher world.

In ever-thriving legions, he has been handed down to us without changing his characteristics. He is to-day as he was in the old times of the continents: the prints in the chalky slates proclaim the fact aloud. Under any such print, I would venture to write the name of the genus, sometimes even of the species.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form. By consulting the modern Curculionid, therefore, we shall obtain a very approximate chapter upon the biology of his predecessors, at the time when Provence had great lakes filled with crocodiles and palm-trees on their banks wherewith to shade them. The history of the present will teach us the history of the past.