Jean-Henri Fabre

“ A pitiful sight is that of the Golden Carabus, or Gold Beetle,21 dying of the sting. Unable to stand on its legs convulsively extended into stilts, the insect tumbles over, picks itself up again, again falls down and [74] again hoists itself to its feet, only to fall once more. The tip of the intestine, with its horny armour, sticks out and swells as though the creature were about to discharge its entrails; the crop belches a black torrent that swamps the head; the golden wing-cases, lifting their cuirass, reveal the poor nudities of the abdomen. Next morning, the tarsi are still quivering. ”

“ An old olive-stump softened underground by decay, provides me with the larva of the Rhinoceros Beetle. It is a plump sausage, as thick as a man’s thumb. When stung by the Scorpion, the paunchy grub glides among [92] the scraps of decayed olive-wood with which I have furnished a glass jar; heedless of its mishap, it works its jaws so lustily that, eight months later, having thrived and waxed fat, it is preparing its cell for the metamorphosis. It has passed through the dreadful ordeal unscathed.
As for the adult insect, we have already seen what it does. ”

“ CHAPTER III THE TEREBINTH-LOUSE: THE GALLS
For curious methods of generation, the Plant-lice bear the palm. Nowhere shall we find anything to beat them unless we pry into the secrets of the sea. We must not look to them for remarkable feats of instinct. The humble, round-bellied Lice are incapable of such achievements; to these stay-at-homes the lifting of a foot spells an excess of emancipation. But they will tell us by what attempts, bewildering in their energy and variety, the universal law that governs the transmission of life has come into being. ”

“ To achieve transfiguration without a hitch in such a tumult the insect must be peculiarly favoured by fortune.
The pot-bellied orange Lice are now handsome, black, slender midges, provided with four wings. Their secluded life is over; the time has come for soaring in the open air. But how will they get out? The internees are quite incapable of making a breach in the ramparts: they have no tools. Well, what the prisoners cannot accomplish the fortress itself will do. When the population is ripe the gall is ripe too, so closely does the calendar of the bush synchronize with that of the insect. ”

“ As the weather grows milder, we shall see a numerous population slowly emerging from the heap of leaves that have fallen at the foot of the spurge. It is the Dorthesia quitting her winter quarters under the remnants of the old foliage, and climbing, gradually, by cautious stages, from the base to the topmost summits of the plant, where the joys of heat and radiant light await her, together with the delights of an inexhaustible feeding-bottle. ”

“ The mother, it is true, does not sit upon her eggs, being as she is without an incubator; she does not feed her offspring, who for that matter do not require her assistance; but the part which she plays is, none the less, one of exquisite tenderness. For seven or eight months she watches over her brood, protecting it with a devotion equal to that of the bird, or even greater.
Maternity, the supreme inspiration of the noblest instincts, has thousands upon thousands of masterpieces to bear witness to its skill. ”

“ The Ants, therefore, crowd about the distillery; they form quite a company; by threes and fours they lick the opening of the gourd-like vessel; and however high the Kermes is installed amidst the foliage of the oak, they possess a most wonderful power of discovering it. When I see one slowly climbing I have only to follow her with my eyes; she takes me straight to the Ant’s tavern. She is my infallible guide when, still in its early youth, the Kermes by its minuteness would escape the glance of an eye not warned and on the alert. ”

“ The very small begets the huge. The gall is at first a pretty little horn, regular in shape and green all over. Open it. The interior is a magnificent flesh-colour and soft as satin. For the moment, a solitary Louse, a black one, inhabits this attractive residence.
The five kinds of establishment have been founded, from the fold to the horn; they have only to grow larger as their population increases. Now what are they doing, these Lice immured in solitary confinement, each after her own fashion? To begin with, they are changing their clothes and their shape. ”

“ Let us, in October, open a globular or horn-shaped gall which has dried up without bursting. We shall find it crammed with black Lice, all winged and all dead; a mass of procreators who have died after parturition. Beneath the heap of corpses, more especially against the walls of the dwelling, the lens, in amazement, discovers thousands of young ones. This is a new people: it is the future struggling amidst the cadaveric relics of the past; it is the progeny of the winged Lice, the family born in prison. ”

“ When summer is over, in September, let us open a gall, no matter which, spread out the contents on a sheet of paper, take up a magnifying-glass, and see what there is to see. Folds, spindles, auricles, globes and horns afford us almost the same spectacle, allowing for numbers, which are here restricted and there enormous. The Lice are a magnificent orange yellow. The largest have stumps on their shoulders, the rudiments of wings to be. ”

“ A lantern hung outside the panes allows us to follow events. [113]
It is our distraction after the worries of the day; it is our play-house. In this theatre for simple folk, the performances are so highly interesting that, the moment the lantern is lighted, all of us, great and small alike, come and take our places in the stalls; all, down to Tom, the House-dog. Tom, it is true, indifferent to Scorpion affairs, like the true philosopher that he is, lies at our feet and dozes, but only with one eye, keeping the other always open on his friends the children. ”

“ Just as I saw her last year emerging from her natal shell, so once more I behold her now. No change whatever is visible: neither of aspect, nor shape, nor colouration, nor size. She goes bustling along as though [335] busy in the extreme, searching doubtless for a spot to her liking. At every moment the smallest wrinkle in the bark conceals her from sight. I place the twig that bears the precious atomy under a bell-glass. On the following day I expect a moult. The bustling little insect is replaced by a motionless corpuscle. This is the first stage of the globular Kermes. ”

“ He does not hunt his quarry: he gathers it in. There is neither hurry nor contest, no movement of the tail, no use of the poisoned weapon. The Scorpion placidly grabs the morsel with his two-fingered hands; the pincers bend back, carry it to the mouth and then both hold it until it is all consumed. The insect that is being eaten, full of life, struggles between the mandibles, to the resentment of the eater, who likes to nibble quietly. ”

“ Ah, life made a superb discovery when, in prehistoric times, it invented the Scorpion! To work without eating: what an incomparable gift, had it become general! What miseries, what horrors would be abolished, if we were freed from the tyranny of the stomach! ”

“ Nature the universal nurse, alma parens rerum, is infinitely tender in her treatment of the germs, the treasure of the future; she is a harsh step-mother to the parent. As soon as the creature is capable of supporting itself, she delivers it without pity to life’s [214] cruel schooling, which teaches it to resist in the fierce struggle for existence. At first a tender mother, she gives the Pentatoma a delightful casket with a sealed lid to guard the budding flesh from harm; she caps the tiny insect with a mechanical device to set it free, a masterpiece of delicate ingenuity ”

“ On the bare soil, on stones, on dry bark, the little Lice undoubtedly perish. They need food quickly; and they are scarcely capable of wandering in quest of it themselves. Their sucker, sometimes of inordinate length, projecting beyond the tip of the abdomen like a caudal rapier, demands that the wearer shall erect it, shall drive it into some yielding source of sap. The insect must drink or die. In the test-tubes wherein I collect the young Lice born before my eyes, my captives die in less than a fortnight from want of food. ”

“ At length they perish, with their belated young. The gall is a deserted ruin.
Let us return to the emigrants, checked in their flight by the window-panes. In shape, colour and size they are all alike; the swarm is a monotonous repetition of the same individual; there is not one detail, however minute, to denote any difference. Yet we should expect to find males and females here. The Plant-louse, until this moment in the humble larval stage, has just acquired the attributes of the perfect insect. The heavy, pot-bellied Louse has become a slender midge, glorified by four iridescent wings. ”

“ The Grey Bug, the subject of my story, is less frequent than the others in my neighbourhood: on the rosemaries in the enclosure, my field of exploration, I find three or four which, when placed under glass, do not give me any eggs. The set-back does not seem irreparable: what the grey refuses to reveal the green or the yellow or the red-and-black striped—one and all of similar formation and like habits—will show me. In species so closely akin, the family cares of the one must, in all but a few details, be reproduced in the others. ”

“ Without any sort of contest, therefore, the Scorpion curves his tail, brings it down in front of his forehead and drives the sting, entirely at his ease, into the victim’s black breast. This is not the instantaneous thrust of the Wasps and the other four-winged fighters: to make the weapon penetrate requires a certain effort. The knotted tail pushes, swaying slightly: it turns the sting to and fro as we twist a pointed tool with our fingers to make it enter a hard substance. ”

“ THE IMMUNITY OF LARVÆ
So little do we possess the Scorpion’s secret that unexpected facts crop up that strangely complicate the problem. The study of life brings us these surprises. Repeated experiments, with mutually consistent results, seem to justify our formulation of a rule when, suddenly, important exceptions arise, compelling us to follow a fresh path, directly opposed to the first, and leading us to doubt which is the last stage on the road to knowledge. ”

“ When I topple over the family with a slight stroke of the camel-hair pencil, it is amusing to see how quickly the unhorsed ones resume their seat in the saddle. The fringes of the housings are grasped, the tail is used as a lever and, with a bound, the rider is in his place. This curious carpet, a real boarding-net which makes climbing easy, lasts, without dislocations, for nearly a week, that is to say, until the emancipation. ”

“ Amid the hubbub, the Locusts hop, the Moths beat the ground with the stumps of their wings, the Dragon-flies quiver; and the Scorpions pass. They tread them underfoot, they topple them over, they push them aside with a stroke of the tail; in short, they absolutely refuse to look at them. They have other business in hand.
Almost all of them skirt the glass wall. Some of them obstinately attempt to scale it: they hoist themselves on their tails, fall down, try again elsewhere. With their outstretched fists they knock against the pane; they want to get away at all costs. ”

“ Meantime, signs of the colouring appear; the tail and belly are tinged with saffron, the claws assume the soft brilliancy of translucent amber. Youth beautifies all things. The little Languedocian Scorpions are really magnificent. If they remained thus, if they did not carry a poison-still, soon to become threatening, they would be pretty creatures which we should find a pleasure in rearing. Soon the wish for emancipation awakens in them. They gladly descend from the mother’s back to frolic merrily round about her. ”

“ There are some who clamber up the the mother’s tail, perch on the crest of the curve and seem to delight in [177] looking down from this point of vantage upon the crowd. More acrobats arrive, who dislodge them and take their places. All want their share in the curiosities provided by the conning-tower.
The bulk of the family is around the mother; there is a constant swarm of brats that crawl under the belly and there squat, leaving their forehead, with the gleaming black eye-points, outside. The more restless prefer the mother’s legs, which to them represent a gymnasium ”

“ The appearance of the stuff is amazing. This dust is moving, these ashes are alive, and with life so numerous that the very idea of computation becomes alarming. It is the legion of the uncountable. In safeguarding a Louse fecundity knows no limits.
By their white hue we may distinguish those eggs that are not yet ripe for hatching. Now, at the end of June, these are the less numerous. The others, coloured by the tiny creatures within them, are bright red or orange yellow. Preponderant over all is the collection of white specks, the tattered husks of the eggs which have been hatched. ”

“ On the tips of the leaves, here and there, are isolated a few Lice who are surrounding themselves with a fragile waxen enclosure, a sort of shapeless capsule, while the rest of the flock, nearly all, in fact, continue to drink, their bills plunged into the bark. Who are these solitaries, withdrawn from the world of drinkers? They are males, undergoing transformation. I open some of these fragile capsules. In the centre, on a downy bed like that which fills the wallets of the mothers, lies a nymph endowed with wing-stumps. ”

“ Always brisk and lively without a scrap of food, they go to earth under the potsherd. They rummage about and dig themselves a burrow closed by a barrier of sand. From time to time, especially in the evening twilight, they issue from their lair, take a short stroll and then go home again, behaving just as though they had been fed. ”