The Life of the Fly by J. Henri FabreWith Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography (page 2)

taking any refreshment. Besides, what would it eat? In the cocoon invaded there is nothing but the larva of the mason bee; and the worm cannot make use of this before acquiring the sucker that comes with the second form. Nevertheless, this life of abstinence is not a life of idleness. The animalcule explores its dish, now here, now elsewhere; it runs all over it with looper strides; it pries into the neighborhood by lifting and shaking its head.

I see a need for this long wait under a transitory form that requires no feeding. The egg is laid by the mother on the surface of the nest, somewhere near a suitable cell, I dare say, but still at a distance from the fostering larva, which is protected by a thick rampart. It is for the new born grub to make its own way to the provisions, not by violence and house breaking, of which it is incapable, but by patiently slipping through a maze of cracks, first tried, then abandoned, then tried again. It is a very difficult task, even for this most slender worm, for the bee’s masonry is exceedingly compact. There are no chinks due to bad building; no fissures due to the weather; nothing but an apparently impenetrable homogeneity. I see but one weak part and that only in a few nests: it is the line where the dome joins the surface of the stone. An imperfect soldering between two materials of different nature, cement and flint, may leave a breach wide enough to admit besiegers as thin as a hair. Nevertheless, the lens is far from always finding an inlet of this kind on the nests occupied by Anthrax flies.

And so I am ready to allow that the animalcule wandering in search of its cell has the whole area of the dome at its disposal when selecting an entrance. Where the line auger of the Leucospis can enter, is there not room enough for the even slimmer Anthrax grub? True, the Leucospis possesses muscular force and a hard boring tool. The Anthrax is extremely weak and has nothing but invincible patience. It does at great length of time what the other, furnished with superior implements, accomplishes in three hours. This explains the fortnight spent by the Anthrax under the initial form, the object of which is to overcome the obstacle of the mason’s wall, to pierce through the texture of the cocoon and to reach the victuals.

I even believe that it takes longer. The work is so laborious and the worker so feeble! I cannot tell how long it is since my bantlings attained their object. Perhaps, aided by easy roads, they had reached their fostering larvae long before the completion of their first babyhood, the end of which they were spending before my eyes, with no apparent purpose, in exploring their provisions. The time had not yet come for them to change their skins and take their seats at the table. Their fellows must still, for the most part, be wandering through the pores of the masonry; and this was what made my search so vain at the start.

A few facts seem to suggest that the entrance into the cell may be delayed for several months by the difficulty of the passages. There are a few Anthrax grubs beside the remains of pupae not far removed from the final metamorphosis; there are others, but very rarely, on Mason bees already in the perfect state. These grubs are sickly and appear to be ailing; the provisions are too solid and do not lend themselves to the delicate suckling of the worms. Who can these laggards be but animalcules that have roamed too long in the walls of the nest? Failing to make their entrance at the proper time, they no longer find viands to suit them. The primary larva of the Sitaris continues from the autumn to the following spring. Even so the initial form of the Anthrax might well continue, not in inactivity, but in stubborn attempts to overcome the thick bulwark.

My young worms, when transferred with their provisions into tubes, remained stationary, on the average, for a couple of weeks. At last, I saw them shrink and then rid themselves of their epidermis and become the grub which I was so anxiously expecting as the final reply to all my doubts. It was indeed, from the first, the grub of the Anthrax, the cream-colored cylinder with the little button of a head, followed by a hump. Applying its cupping glass to the mason bee, the worm, without delay, began its meal, which lasts another fortnight. The reader knows the rest.

Before taking leave of the animalcule, let us devote a few lines to its instinct. It has just awakened to life under the fierce kisses of the sun. The bare stone is its cradle, the rough clay its welcomer, as it makes its entrance into the world, a poor thread of scarce cohering albumen. But safety lies within; and behold the atom of animated glair embarking on its struggle with the flint. Obstinately, it sounds each pore; it slips in, crawls on, retreats, begins again. The radical of the germinating seed is no more persevering in its efforts to descend into the cool earth than is the Anthrax grub in creeping into the lump of mortar. What inspiration urges it towards its food at the bottom of the clod, what compass guides it? What does it know of those depths, of what lies therein or where? Nothing. What does the root know of the earth’s fruitfulness? Again nothing. Yet both make for the nourishing spot. Theories are put forward, most learned theories, introducing capillary action, osmosis and cellular imbibition, to explain why the caulicle ascends and the radical descends. Shall physical or chemical forces explain why the animalcule digs into the hard clay? I bow profoundly, without understanding or even trying to understand. The question is far above, our inane means.

The biography of the Anthrax is now complete, save for the details relating to the egg, as yet unknown. In the vast majority of insects subject to metamorphoses, the hatching yields the larval form which will remain unchanged until the nymphosis. By virtue of a remarkable variation, revealing a new vein of observation to the entomologist, the Anthrax flies, in the larval state, assume two successive shapes, differing greatly one from the other, both in structure and in the part which they are called upon to play. I will describe this double stage of the organism by the phrase ‘larval dimorphism.’ The initial form, that issuing from the egg, I will call ‘the primary larva;’ the second form shall be ‘the secondary larva.’ Among the Anthrax flies, the function of the primary larva is to reach the provisions, on which the mother is unable to lay her egg. It is capable of moving and endowed with ambulatory bristles, which allow the slim creature to glide through the smallest interstices in the wall of a Bee’s nest, to slip through the woof of the cocoon and to make its way to the larva intended for its successor’s food. When this object is attained, its part is played. Then appears the secondary larva, deprived of any means of progression. Relegated to the inside of the invaded cell, as incapable of leaving it by its own efforts as it was of entering, this one has no mission in life but that of eating. It is a stomach that loads itself, digests and goes on adding to its reserves. Next comes the pupa, armed for the exit even as the primary larva was equipped for entering. When the deliverance is accomplished, the perfect insect appears, busy with its laying. The Anthrax cycle is thus divided into four periods, each of which corresponds with special forms and functions. The primary larva enters the casket containing provisions; the secondary larva consumes these provisions; the pupa brings the insect to light by boring through the enclosing wall; the perfect insect strews its eggs; and the cycle starts afresh.

CHAPTER V HEREDITY

Facts which I have set forth elsewhere prove that certain dung beetles’ make an exception to the rule of paternal indifference–a general rule in the insect world–and know something of domestic cooperation. The father works with almost the same zeal as the mother in providing for the settlement of the family. Whence do these favored ones derive a gift that borders on morality?

One might suggest the cost of installing the youngsters. Once they have to be furnished with a lodging and to be left the wherewithal to live, is it not an advantage, in the interests of the race, that the father should come to the mother’s assistance? Work divided between the two will ensure the comfort which solitary work, its strength overtaxed, would deny. This seems excellent reasoning; but it is much more often contradicted than confirmed by the facts. Why is the Sisyphus a hard working paterfamilias and the sacred beetle an idle vagabond? And yet the two pill rollers practice the same industry and the same method of rearing their young. Why does the Lunary Copris know what his near kinsman, the Spanish Copris, does not? The first assists his mate, never forsakes her. The second seeks a divorce at an early stage and leaves the nuptial roof before the children’s rations are massed and kneaded into shape. Nevertheless, on both sides, there is the same big outlay on a cellarful of egg-shaped pills, whose neat rows call for long and watchful supervision. The similarity of the produce leads one to believe in similarity of manners; and this is a mistake.

Let us turn elsewhere, to the wasps and bees, who unquestionably come first in the laying up of a heritage for their offspring. Whether the treasure hoarded for the benefit of the sons be a pot of honey or a bag of game, the father never takes the smallest part in the work. He does not so much as give a sweep of the broom when it comes to tidying the outside of the dwelling. To do nothing is his invariable rule. The bringing up of the family, therefore, however expensive it may be in certain cases, has not given rise to the instinct of paternity. Then where are we to look for a reply?

Let us make the question a wider one. Let us leave the animal, for a moment, and occupy ourselves with man. We have our own instincts, some of which take the name of genius when they attain a degree of might that towers over the plain of mediocrity. We are amazed by the unusual, springing out of flat commonplaces; we are spellbound by the luminous speck shining in the wonted darkness. We admire; and, failing to understand whence came those glorious harvests in this one or in that, we say of them: “They have the gift.”

A goatherd amuses himself by making combinations with heaps of little pebbles. He becomes an astoundingly quick and accurate reckoner without other aid than a moment’s reflection. He terrifies us with the conflict of enormous numbers which blend in an orderly fashion in his mind, but whose mere statement overwhelms us by its inextricable confusion. This marvelous arithmetical juggler has an instinct, a genius, a gift for figures.

A second, at the age when most of us delight in tops and marbles, leaves the company of his boisterous playmates and listens to the echo of celestial harps singing within him. His head is a cathedral filled with the strains of an imaginary organ. Rich cadences, a secret concert heard by him and him alone, steep him in ecstasy. All hail to that predestined one who, some day, will rouse our noblest emotions with his musical chords. He has an instinct, a genius, a gift for sounds.

A third, a brat who cannot yet eat his bread and jam without smearing his face all over, takes a delight in fashioning clay into little figures that are astonishingly lifelike for all their artless awkwardness. He takes a knife and makes the briar root grin into all sorts of entertaining masks; he carves boxwood in the semblance of a horse or sheep; he engraves the effigy of his dog on sandstone. Leave him alone; and, if Heaven second his efforts, he may become a famous sculptor. He has an instinct, a gift, a genius for form.

And so with others in every branch of human activity: art and science, industry and commerce, literature and philosophy. We have within us, from the start, that which will distinguish us from the vulgar herd. Now to what do we owe this distinctive character? To some throwback of atavism, men tell us. Heredity, direct in one case, remote in another, hands it down to us, increased or modified by time. Search the records of the family and you will discover the source of the genius, a mere trickle at first, then a stream, then a mighty river.

The darkness that lies behind that word heredity! Metaphysical science has tried to throw a little light upon it and has succeeded only in making unto itself a barbarous jargon, leaving obscurity more obscure than before. As for us, who hunger after lucidity, let us relinquish abstruse theories to whoever delights in them and confine our ambition to observable facts, without pretending to explain the quackery of the plasma. Our method certainly will not reveal to us the origin of instinct; but it will at least show us where it would be waste of time to look for it.

In this sort of research, a subject known through and through, down to its most intimate peculiarities, is indispensable. Where shall we find that subject? There would be a host of them and magnificent ones, if it were possible to read the sealed pages of others’ lives; but no one can sound an existence outside his own and even then he can think himself lucky if a retentive memory and the habit of reflection give his soundings the proper accuracy. As none of us is able to project himself into another’s skin, we must needs, in considering this problem, remain inside our own.

To talk about one’s self is hateful, I know. The reader must have the kindness to excuse me for the sake of the study in hand. I shall take the silent beetle’s place in the witness box, cross- examining myself in all simplicity of soul, as I do the animal, and asking myself whence that one of my instincts which stands out above the others is derived.

Since Darwin bestowed upon me the title of ‘incomparable observer,’ the epithet has often come back to me, from this side and from that, without my yet understanding what particular merit I have shown. It seems to me so natural, so much within everybody’s scope, so absorbing to interest one’s self in everything that swarms around us! However, let us pass on and admit that the compliment is not unfounded.

My hesitation ceases if it is a question of admitting my curiosity in matters that concern the insect. Yes, I possess the gift, the instinct that impels me to frequent that singular world; yes, I know that I am capable of spending on those studies an amount of precious time which would be better employed in making provision, if possible, for the poverty of old age; yes, I confess that I am an enthusiastic observer of the animal. How was this characteristic propensity, at once the torment and delight of my life, developed? And, to begin with, how much does it owe to heredity?

The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past. And yet what surpassingly instructive records, comforting too and pious, would be the family papers that should tell us who our forebears were and speak to us of their patient struggles with harsh fate, their stubborn efforts to build up, atom by atom, what we are today. No story would come up with that for individual interest. But by the very force of things the home is abandoned; and, when the brood has flown, the nest is no longer recognized.

I, a humble journeyman in the toilers’ hive, am therefore very poor in family recollections. In the second degree of ancestry, my facts become suddenly obscured. I will linger over them a moment for two reasons: first, to inquire into the influence of heredity; and, secondly, to leave my children yet one more page concerning them.

I did not know my maternal grandfather. This venerable ancestor was, I have been told, a process server in one of the poorest parishes of the Rouergue. He used to engross on stamped paper in a primitive spelling. With his well-filled pen case and ink horn, he went drawing out deeds up hill and down dale, from one insolvent wretch to another more insolvent still. Amid his atmosphere of pettifoggery, this rudimentary scholar, waging battle on life’s acerbities, certainly paid no attention to the insect; at most, if he met it, he would crush it under foot. The unknown animal, suspected of evil doing, deserved no further enquiry. Grandmother, on her side, apart from her housekeeping and her beads, knew still less about anything. She looked on the alphabet as a set of hieroglyphics only fit to spoil your sight for nothing, unless you were scribbling on paper bearing the government stamp. Who in the world, in her day, among the small folk, dreamt of knowing how to read and write? That luxury was reserved for the attorney, who himself made but a sparing use of it. The insect, I need hardly say, was the least of her cares. If sometimes, when rinsing her salad at the tap, she found a caterpillar on the lettuce leaves, with a start of fright she would fling the loathsome thing away, thus cutting short relations reputed dangerous. In short, to both my maternal grandparents, the insect was a creature of no interest whatever and almost always a repulsive object, which one dared not touch with the tip of one’s finger. Beyond a doubt, my taste for animals was not derived from them.

I have more precise information regarding my grandparents on the father’s side, for their green old age allowed me to know them both. They were people of the soil, whose quarrel with the alphabet was so great that they had never opened a book in their lives; and they kept a lean farm on the cold granite ridge of the Rouergue tableland. The house, standing alone among the heath and broom, with no neighbor for many a mile around and visited at intervals by the wolves, was to them the hub of the universe. But for a few surrounding villages, whither the calves were driven on fair days, the rest was only very vaguely known by hearsay. In this wild solitude, the mossy fens, with their quagmires oozing with iridescent pools, supplied the cows, the principal source of wealth, with rich, wet grass. In summer, on the short swards of the slopes, the sheep were penned day and night, protected from beasts of prey by a fence of hurdles propped up with pitchforks. When the grass was cropped close at one spot, the fold was shifted elsewhere. In the center was the shepherd’s rolling hut, a straw cabin. Two watchdogs, equipped with spiked collars, were answerable for tranquillity if the thieving wolf appeared in the night from out the neighboring woods.

Padded with a perpetual layer of cow dung, in which I sank to my knees, broken up with shimmering puddles of dark brown liquid manure, the farmyard also boasted a numerous population. Here the lambs skipped, the geese trumpeted, the fowls scratched the ground and the sow grunted with her swarm of little pigs hanging to her dugs.

The harshness of the climate did not give husbandry the same chances. In a propitious season, they would set fire to a stretch of moorland bristling with gorse and send the swing plow across the ground enriched with the cinders of the blaze. This yielded a few acres of rye, oats and potatoes. The best corners were kept for hemp, which furnished the distaffs and spindles of the house with the material for linen and was looked upon as grandmother’s private crop.

Grandfather, therefore, was, before all, a herdsman versed in matters of cows and sheep, but completely ignorant of aught else. How dumbfounded he would have been to learn that, in the remote future, one of his family would become enamoured of those insignificant animals to which he had never vouchsafed a glance in his life! Had he guessed that that lunatic was myself, the scapegrace seated at the table by his side, what a smack I should have caught in the neck, what a wrathful look!

“The idea of wasting one’s time with that nonsense!” he would have thundered.

For the patriarch was not given to joking. I can still see his serious face, his unclipped head of hair, often brought back behind his ears with a flick of the thumb and spreading its ancient Gallic mane over his shoulders. I see his little three-cornered hat, his small clothes buckled at the knees, his wooden shoes, stuffed with straw, that echoed as he walked. Ah, no! Once childhood’s games were past, it would never have done to rear the Grasshopper and unearth the Dung beetle from his natural surroundings.

Grandmother, pious soul, used to wear the eccentric headdress of the Rouergue highlanders: a large disk of black felt, stiff as a plank, adorned in the middle with a crown a finger’s breadth high and hardly wider across than a six franc piece. A black ribbon fastened under the chin maintained the equilibrium of this elegant, but unsteady circle. Pickles, hemp, chickens, curds and whey, butter; washing the clothes, minding the children, seeing to the meals of the household: say that and you have summed up the strenuous woman’s round of ideas. On her left side, the distaff, with its load of flax; in her right hand, the spindle turning under a quick twist of her thumb, moistened at intervals with her tongue: so she went through life, unwearied, attending to the order and the welfare of the house. I see her in my mind’s eye particularly on winter evenings, which were more favorable to family talk. When the hour came for meals, all of us, big and little, would take our seats round a long table, on a couple of benches, deal planks supported by four rickety legs. Each found his wooden bowl and his tin spoon in front of him. At one end of the table always stood an enormous rye loaf, the size of a cartwheel, wrapped in a linen cloth with a pleasant smell of washing, and remained until nothing was left of it. With a vigorous stroke, grandfather would cut off enough for the needs of the moment; then he would divide the piece among us with the one knife which he alone was entitled to wield. It was now each one’s business to break up his bit with his fingers and to fill his bowl as he pleased.

Next came grandmother’s turn. A capacious pot bubbled lustily and sang upon the flames in the hearth, exhaling an appetizing savor of bacon and turnips. Armed with a long metal ladle, grandmother would take from it, for each of us in turn, first the broth, wherein to soak the bread, and next the ration of turnips and bacon, partly fat and partly lean, filling the bowl to the top. At the other end of the table was the pitcher, from which the thirsty were free to drink at will. What appetites we had and what festive meals those were, especially when a cream cheese, homemade, was there to complete the banquet!

Near us blazed the huge fireplace, in which whole tree trunks were consumed in the extreme cold weather. From a corner of that monumental, soot-glazed chimney, projected, at a convenient height, a bracket with a slate shelf, which served to light the kitchen when we sat up late. On this we burnt chips of pine wood, selected among the most translucent, those containing the most resin. They shed over the room a lurid red light, which saved the walnut oil in the lamp.

When the bowls were emptied and the last crumb of cheese scraped up, grandam went back to her distaff, on a stool by the chimney corner. We children, boys and girls, squatting on our heels and putting out our hands to the cheerful fire of furze, formed a circle round her and listened to her with eager ears. She told us stories, not greatly varied, it is true, but still wonderful, for the wolf often played a part in them. I should have very much liked to see this wolf, the hero of so many tales that made our flesh creep; but the shepherd always refused to take me into his straw hut, in the middle of the fold, at night. When we had done talking about the horrid wolf, the dragon and the serpent and when the resinous splinters had given out their last gleams, we went to sleep the sweet sleep that toil gives. As the youngest of the household, I had a right to the mattress, a sack stuffed with oat chaff. The others had to be content with straw.

I owe a great deal to you, dear grandmother: it was in your lap that I found consolation for my first sorrows. You have handed down to me, perhaps, a little of your physical vigor, a little of your love of work; but certainly you were no more accountable than grandfather for my passion for insects.

Nor was either of my own parents. My mother, who was quite illiterate, having known no teacher than the bitter experience of a harassed life, was the exact opposite of what my tastes required for their development. My peculiarity must seek its origin elsewhere: that I will swear. But I do not find it in my father, either. The excellent man, who was hard working and sturdily built like granddad, had been to school as a child. He knew how to write, though he took the greatest liberties with spelling; he knew how to read and understood what he read, provided the reading presented no more serious literary difficulties than occurred in the stories in the almanac. He was the first of his line to allow himself to be tempted by the town and he lived to regret it. Badly off, having but little outlet for his industry, making God knows what shifts to pick up a livelihood, he went through all the disappointments of the countryman turned townsman. Persecuted by bad luck, borne down by the burden, for all his energy and good will, he was far indeed from starting me in entomology. He had other cares, cares more direct and more serious. A good cuff or two when he saw me pinning an insect to a cork was all the encouragement that I received from him. Perhaps he was right.

The conclusion is positive: there is nothing in heredity to explain my taste for observation. You may say that I do not go far enough back. Well, what should I find beyond the grandparents where my facts come to a stop? I know, partly. I should find even more uncultured ancestors: sons of the soil, plowmen, sowers of rye, neat herds; one and all, by the very force of things, of not the least account in the nice matters of observation.

And yet, in me, the observer, the inquirer into things began to take shape almost in infancy. Why should I not describe my first discoveries? They are ingenuous in the extreme, but will serve notwithstanding to tell us something of the way in which tendencies first show themselves. I was five or six years old. That the poor household might have one mouth less to feed, I had been placed in grandmother’s care, as I have just been saying. Here, in solitude, my first gleams of intelligence were awakened amidst the geese, the calves and the sheep. Everything before that is impenetrable darkness. My real birth is at that moment when the dawn of personality rises, dispersing the mists of unconsciousness and leaving a lasting memory. I can see myself plainly, clad in a soiled frieze frock flapping against my bare heels; I remember the handkerchief hanging from my waist by a bit of string, a handkerchief often lost and replaced by the back of my sleeve.

There I stand one day, a pensive urchin, with my hands behind my back and my face turned to the sun. The dazzling splendor fascinates me. I am the Moth attracted by the light of the lamp. With what am I enjoying the glorious radiance: with my mouth or my eyes? That is the question put by my budding scientific curiosity. Reader, do not smile: the future observer is already practicing and experimenting. I open my mouth wide and close my eyes: the glory disappears. I open my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappears. I repeat the performance, with the same result. The question’s solved: I have learnt by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. Oh, what a discovery! That evening, I told the whole house all about it. Grandmother smiled fondly at my simplicity: the others laughed at it. ‘Tis the way of the world.

Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighboring bushes, a sort of jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little bird chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter and that quickly. True, there is the wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there, behind that clump of groom. I stand on the look out for long, but all in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle ceases. I try again next day and the day after. This time, my stubborn watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is not a bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind legs my playfellows have taught me to like: a poor recompense for my prolonged ambush. The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy flavor, but what I have just learnt. I now know, from personal observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not publish my discovery, for fear of the same laughter that greeted my story about the sun.

Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to smile to me with their great violet eyes. Later on, I see, in their place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the summer, grandfather comes with a spade and turns my field of observation topsy-turvy. From under ground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeonholed for good and all in my memory.

With an ever watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practiced by himself, all unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the large white butterfly goes to the cabbage and the red admiral to the thistle. He looked and inquired, drawn by a curiosity whereof heredity did not know the secret. He bore within him the germ of a faculty unknown to his family; he kept alive a glimmer that was foreign to the ancestral hearth. What will become of that infinitesimal spark of childish fancy? It will die out, beyond a doubt, unless education intervene, giving it the fuel of example, fanning it with the breath of experience. In that case, schooling will explain what heredity leaves unexplained. This is what we will examine in the next chapter.

CHAPTER VI MY SCHOOLING

I am back in the village, in my father’s house. I am now seven years old; and it is high time that I went to school. Nothing could have turned out better: the master is my godfather. What shall I call the room in which I was to become acquainted with the alphabet? It would be difficult to find the exact word, because the room served for every purpose. It was at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining room and, at times, a chicken house and a piggery. Palatial schools were not dreamt of in those days; any wretched hovel was thought good enough.

A broad fixed ladder led to the floor above. Under the ladder stood a big bed in a boarded recess. What was there upstairs? I never quite knew. I would see the master sometimes bring down an armful of hay for the ass, sometimes a basket of potatoes which the housewife emptied into the pot in which the little porkers’ food was cooked. It must have been a loft of sorts, a storehouse of provisions for man and beast. Those two apartments composed the whole building.

To return to the lower one, the schoolroom: a window faces south, the only window in the house, a low, narrow window whose frame you can touch at the same time with your head and both your shoulders. This sunny aperture is the only lively spot in the dwelling, it overlooks the greater part of the village, which straggles along the slopes of a slanting valley. In the window recess is the master’s little table.

The opposite wall contains a niche in which stands a gleaming copper pail full of water. Here the parched children can relieve their thirst when they please, with a cup left within their reach. At the top of the niche are a few shelves bright with pewter plates, dishes and drinking vessels, which are taken down from their sanctuary on great occasions only.

More or less everywhere, at any spot which the light touches, are crudely colored pictures, pasted on the walls. Here is Our Lady of the Seven Dolours, the disconsolate Mother of God opening her blue cloak to show her heart pierced with seven daggers. Between the sun and moon, which stare at you with their great, round eyes, is the Eternal Father, whose robe swells as though puffed out with the storm. To the right of the window, in the embrasure, is the Wandering Jew. He wears a three-cornered hat, a large, white leather apron, hobnailed shoes and a stout stick. ‘Never was such a bearded man seen before or after,’ says the legend that surrounds the picture. The draftsman has not forgotten this detail: the old man’s beard spreads in a snowy avalanche over the apron and comes down to his knees. On the left is Genevieve of Brabant, accompanied by the roe, with fierce Golo hiding in the bushes, sword in hand. Above hangs The Death of Mr. Credit, slain by defaulters at the door of his inn; and so on and so on, in every variety of subject, at all the unoccupied spots of the four walls.

I was filled with admiration of this picture gallery, which held one’s eyes with its great patches of red, blue, green and yellow. The master, however, had not set up his collection with a view to training our minds and hearts. That was the last and least of the worthy man’s ambitions. An artist in his fashion, he had adorned his house according to his taste; and we benefited by the scheme of decoration.

While the gallery of halfpenny pictures made me happy all the year round, there was another entertainment which I found particularly attractive in winter, in frosty weather, when the snow lay long on the ground. Against the far wall stands the fireplace, as monumental in size as at my grandmother’s. Its arched cornice occupies the whole width of the room, for the enormous redoubt fulfils more than one purpose. In the middle is the hearth, but, on the right and left, are two breast-high recesses, half wood and half stone. Each of them is a bed, with a mattress stuffed with chaff of winnowed corn. Two sliding planks serve as shutters and close the chest if the sleeper would be alone. This dormitory, sheltered under the chimney mantel, supplies couches for the favored ones of the house, the two boarders. They must lie snug in there at night, with their shutters closed, when the north wind howls at the mouth of the dark valley and sends the snow awhirl. The rest is occupied by the hearth and its accessories: the three- legged stools; the salt box, hanging against the wall to keep its contents dry; the heavy shovel which it takes two hands to wield; lastly, the bellows similar to those with which I used to blow out my cheeks in grandfather’s house. They consist of a mighty branch of pine, hollowed throughout its length with a red-hot iron. By means of this channel, one’s breath is applied, from a convenient distance, to the spot which is to be revived. With a couple of stones for supports, the master’s bundle of sticks and our own logs blaze and flicker, each of us having to bring a log of wood in the morning, if he would share in the treat.

For that matter, the fire was not exactly lit for us, but, above all, to warm a row of three pots in which simmered the pigs’ food, a mixture of potatoes and bran. That, despite the tribute of a log, was the real object of the brushwood fire. The two boarders, on their stools, in the best places, and we others sitting on our heels formed a semicircle around those big cauldrons, full to the brim and giving off little jets of steam, with puff-puff-puffing sounds. The bolder among us, when the master’s eyes were engaged elsewhere, would dig a knife into a well cooked potato and add it to their bit of bread; for I must say that, if we did little work in my school, at least we did a deal of eating. It was the regular custom to crack a few nuts and nibble at a crust while writing our page or setting out our rows of figures.

We, the smaller ones, in addition to the comfort of studying with our mouths full, had every now and then two other delights, which were quite as good as cracking nuts. The back door communicated with the yard where the hen, surrounded by her brood of chicks, scratched at the dung hill, while the little porkers, of whom there were a dozen, wallowed in their stone trough. This door would open sometimes to let one of us out, a privilege which we abused, for the sly ones among us were careful not to close it on returning. Forthwith, the porkers would come running in, one after the other, attracted by the smell of the boiled potatoes. My bench, the one where the youngsters sat, stood against the wall, under the copper pail to which we used to go for water when the nuts had made us thirsty, and was right in the way of the pigs. Up they came trotting and grunting, curling their little tails; they rubbed against our legs; they poked their cold pink snouts into our hands in search of a scrap of crust; they questioned us with their sharp little eyes to learn if we happened to have a dry chestnut for them in our pockets. When they had gone the round, some this way and some that, they went back to the farmyard, driven away by a friendly flick of the master’s handkerchief. Next came the visit of the hen, bringing her velvet-coated chicks to see us. All of us eagerly crumbled a little bread for our pretty visitors. We vied with one another in calling them to us and tickling with our fingers their soft and downy backs. No, there was certainly no lack of distractions.

What could we learn in such a school as that! Let us first speak of the young ones, of whom I was one. Each of us had, or rather was supposed to have, in his hands a little penny book, the alphabet, printed on gray paper. It began, on the cover, with a pigeon, or something like it. Next came a cross, followed by the letters in their order. When we turned over, our eyes encountered the terrible ba, be, bi, bo, bu, the stumbling block of most of us. When we had mastered that formidable page, we were considered to know how to read and were admitted among the big ones. But, if the little book was to be of any use, the least that was required was that the master should interest himself in us to some extent and show us how to set about things. For this, the worthy man, too much taken up with the big ones, had not the time. The famous alphabet with the pigeon was thrust upon us only to give us the air of scholars. We were to contemplate it on our bench, to decipher it with the help of our next neighbor, in case he might know one or two of the letters. Our contemplation came to nothing, being every moment disturbed by a visit to the potatoes in the stew pots, a quarrel among playmates about a marble, the grunting invasion of the porkers or the arrival of the chicks. With the aid of these distractions, we would wait patiently until it was time for us to go home. That was our most serious work.

The big ones used to write. They had the benefit of the small amount of light in the room, by the narrow window where the Wandering Jew and ruthless Golo faced each other, and of the large and only table with its circle of seats. The school supplied nothing, not even a drop of ink; every one had to come with a full set of utensils. The inkhorn of those days, a relic of the ancient pen case of which Rabelais speaks, was a long cardboard box divided into two stages. The upper compartment held the pens, made of goose or turkey quills trimmed with a penknife; the lower contained, in a tiny well, ink made of soot mixed with vinegar.

The master’s great business was to mend the pens–a delicate work, not without danger for inexperienced fingers–and then to trace at the head of the white page a line of strokes, single letters or words, according to the scholar’s capabilities. When that is over, keep an eye on the work of art which is coming to adorn the copy! With what undulating movements of the wrist does the hand, resting on the little finger, prepare and plan its flight! All at once, the hand starts off, flies, whirls; and, lo and behold, under the line of writing is unfurled a garland of circles, spirals and flourishes, framing a bird with outspread wings, the whole, if you please, in red ink, the only kind worthy of such a pen. Large and small, we stood awestruck in the presence of these marvels. The family, in the evening, after supper, would pass from hand to hand the masterpiece brought back from school: ‘What a man!’ was the comment. ‘What a man, to draw you a Holy Ghost with a stroke of the pen!’

What was read at my school? At most, in French, a few selections from sacred history. Latin recurred oftener, to teach us to sing vespers properly. The more advanced pupils tried to decipher manuscript, a deed of sale, the hieroglyphics of some scrivener.

And history, geography? No one ever heard of them. What difference did it make to us whether the earth was round or square! In either case, it was just as hard to make it bring forth anything.

And grammar? The master troubled his head very little about that; and we still less. We should have been greatly surprised by the novelty and the forbidding look of such words in the grammatical jargon as substantive, indicative and subjunctive. Accuracy of language, whether of speech or writing, must be learnt by practice. And none of us was troubled by scruples in this respect. What was the use of all these subtleties, when, on coming out of school, a lad simply went back to his flock of sheep!

And arithmetic? Yes, we did a little of this but not under that learned name. We called it sums. To put down rows of figures, not too long, add them and subtract them one from the other was more or less familiar work. On Saturday evenings, to finish up the week, there was a general orgy of sums. The top boy stood up and, in a loud voice, recited the multiplication table up to twelve times. I say twelve times, for in those days, because of our old duodecimal measures, it was the custom to count as far as the twelve times table, instead of the ten times of the metric system. When this recital was over, the whole class, the little ones included, took it up in chorus, creating such an uproar that chicks and porkers took to flight if they happened to be there. And this went on to twelve times twelve, the first in the row starting the next table and the whole class repeating it as loud as it could yell. Of all that we were taught in school, the multiplication table was what we knew best, for this noisy method ended by dinning the different numbers into our ears. This does not mean that we became skilful reckoners. The cleverest of us easily got muddled with the figures to be carried in a multiplication sum. As for division, rare indeed were they who reached such heights. In short, the moment a problem, however insignificant, had to be solved, we had recourse to mental gymnastics much rather than to the learned aid of arithmetic.

When all is said, our master was an excellent man who could have kept school very well but for his lack of one thing; and that was time. He devoted to us all the little leisure which his numerous functions left him. And, first of all, he managed the property of an absentee landowner, who only occasionally set foot in the village. He had under his care an old castle with four towers, which had become so many pigeon houses; he directed the getting in of the hay, the walnuts, the apples and the oats. We used to help him during the summer, when the school, which was well attended in winter, was almost deserted. All that remained, because they were not yet big enough to work in the fields, were a few children, including him who was one day to set down these memorable facts. Lessons at that time were less dull. They were often given on the hay or on the straw; oftener still, lesson time was spent in cleaning out the dovecote or stamping on the snails that had sallied in rainy weather from their fortresses, the tall box borders of the garden belonging to the castle.

Our master was a barber. With his light hand, which was so clever at beautifying our copies with curlicue birds, he shaved the notabilities of the place: the mayor, the parish priest, the notary. Our master was a bell ringer. A wedding or a christening interrupted the lessons: he had to ring a peal. A gathering storm gave us a holiday: the great bell must be tolled to ward off the lightning and the hail. Our master was a choir singer. With his mighty voice, he filled the church when he led the Magnificat at vespers. Our master wound up and regulated the village clock. This was his proudest function. Giving a glance at the sun, to ascertain the time more or less nearly, he would climb to the top of the steeple, open a huge cage of rafters and find himself in a maze of wheels and springs whereof the secret was known to him alone.

With such a school and such a master and such examples, what will become of my embryo tastes, as yet so imperceptible? In that environment, they seem bound to perish, stifled for ever. Yet no, the germ has life; it works in my veins, never to leave them again. It finds nourishment everywhere, down to the cover of my penny alphabet, embellished with a crude picture of a pigeon which I study and contemplate much more zealously than the A B C. Its round eye, with its circlet of dots, seems to smile upon me. Its wing, of which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs dropped by some vagrant hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my pigeon friend: he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench and wait more or less till school is over.

School out of doors has other charms. When the master takes us to kill the snails in the box borders, I do not always scrupulously fulfil my office as an exterminator. My heel sometimes hesitates before coming down upon the handful which I have gathered. They are so pretty! Just think, there are yellow ones and pink, white ones and brown, all with dark spiral streaks. I fill my pockets with the handsomest, so as to feast my eyes on them at my leisure.

On hay making days in the master’s field, I strike up an acquaintance with the frog. Flayed and stuck at the end of a split stick, he serves as bait to tempt the crayfish to come out of his retreat by the brook side. On the alder trees I catch the Hoplia, the splendid scarab who pales the azure of the heavens. I pick the narcissus and learn to gather, with the tip of my tongue, the tiny drop of honey that lies right at the bottom of the cleft corolla. I also learn that too long indulgence in this feast brings a headache; but this discomfort in no way impairs my admiration for the glorious white flower, which wears a narrow red collar at the throat of its funnel.

When we go to beat the walnut trees, the barren grass plots provide me with locusts spreading their wings, some into a blue fan, others into a red. And thus the rustic school, even in the heart of winter, furnished continuous food for my interest in things. There was no need for precept and example: my passion for animals and plants made progress of itself.

What did not make progress was my acquaintance with my letters, greatly neglected in favor of the pigeon. I was still at the same stage, hopelessly behindhand with the intractable alphabet, when my father, by a chance inspiration, brought me home from the town what was destined to give me a start along the road of reading. Despite the not insignificant part which it played in my intellectual awakening, the purchase was by no means a ruinous one. It was a large print, price six farthings, colored and divided into compartments in which animals of all sorts taught the A B C by means of the first letters of their names.

Where should I keep the precious picture? As it happened, in the room set apart for the children at home, there was a little window like the one in the school, opening in the same way out of a sort of recess and in the same way overlooking most of the village. One was on the right, the other on the left of the castle with the pigeon house towers; both afforded an equally good view of the heights of the slanting valley. I was able to enjoy the school window only at rare intervals, when the master left his little table; the other was at my disposal as often as I liked. I spent long hours there, sitting on a little fixed window seat.

The view was magnificent. I could see the ends of the earth, that is to say, the hills that blocked the horizon, all but a misty gap through which the brook with the crayfish flowed under the alders and willows. High up on the skyline, a few wind-battered oaks bristled on the ridges; and beyond there lay nothing but the unknown, laden with mystery.

At the back of the hollow stood the church, with its three steeples and its clock; and, a little higher, the village square, where a spring, fashioned into a fountain, gurgled from one basin into another, under a wide arched roof. I could hear from my window the chatter of the women washing their clothes, the strokes of their beaters, the rasping of the pots scoured with sand and vinegar. Sprinkled over the slopes are little houses with their garden patches in terraces banked up by tottering walls, which bulge under the thrust of the earth. Here and there are very steep lanes, with the dents of the rock forming a natural pavement. The mule, sure- footed though he be, would hesitate to enter these dangerous passes with his load of branches.

Further on, beyond the village, half-way up the hills, stood the great ever-so-old lime tree, the Tel, as we used to call it, whose sides, hollowed out by the ages, were the favorite hiding places of us children at play. On fair days, its immense, spreading foliage cast a wide shadow over the herds of oxen and sheep. Those solemn days, which only came once a year, brought me a few ideas from without: I learnt that the world did not end with my amphitheater of hills. I saw the inn keeper’s wine arrive on mule back and in goat skin bottles. I hung about the market place and watched the opening of jars full of stewed pears, the setting out of baskets of grapes, an almost unknown fruit, the object of eager covetousness. I stood and gazed in admiration at the roulette board on which, for a sou, according to the spot at which its needle stopped on a circular row of nails, you won a pink poodle made of barley sugar, or a round jar of aniseed sweets, or, much oftener, nothing at all. On a piece of canvas on the ground, rolls of printed calico with red flowers, were displayed to tempt the girls. Close by rose a pile of beechwood clogs, tops and boxwood flutes. Here the shepherds chose their instruments, trying them by blowing a note or two. How new it all was to me! What a lot of things there were to see in this world! Alas, that wonderful time was of but short duration! At night, after a little brawling at the inn, it was all over; and the village returned to silence for a year.

But I must not linger over these memories of the dawn of life. We were speaking of the memorable picture brought from town. Where shall I keep it, to make the best use of it? Why, of course, it must be pasted on the embrasure of my window. The recess, with its seat, shall be my study cell; here I can feast my eyes by turns on the big lime tree and the animals of my alphabet. And this was what I did.

And now, my precious picture, it is our turn, yours and mine. You began with the sacred beast, the ass, whose name, with a big initial, taught me the letter A. The boeuf, the ox, stood for B; the canard, the duck, told me about C; the dindon, the turkey, gave me the letter D. And so on with the rest. A few compartments, it is true, were lacking in clearness. I had no friendly feeling for the hippopotamus, the kamichi, or horned screamer, and the zebu, who aimed at making me say H, K and Z. Those outlandish beasts, which failed to give the abstract letter the support of a recognized reality, caused me to hesitate for a time over their recalcitrant consonants. No matter: father came to my aid in difficult cases; and I made such rapid progress that, in a few days, I was able to turn in good earnest the pages of my little pigeon book, hitherto so undecipherable. I was initiated; I knew how to spell. My parents marveled. I can explain this unexpected progress today. Those speaking pictures, which brought me amongst my friends the beasts, were in harmony with my instincts. If the animal has not fulfilled all that it promised in so far as I am concerned, I have at least to thank it for teaching me to read. I should have succeeded by other means, I do not doubt, but not so quickly nor so pleasantly. Animals forever!

Luck favored me a second time. As a reward for my prowess, I was given La Fontaine’s Fables, in a popular, cheap edition, crammed with pictures, small, I admit, and very inaccurate, but still delightful. Here were the crow, the fox, the wolf, the magpie, the frog, the rabbit, the ass, the dog, the cat: all persons of my acquaintance. The glorious book was immensely to my taste, with its skimpy illustrations on which the animal walked and talked. As to understanding what it said, that was another story! Never mind, my lad! Put together syllables that say nothing to you as yet; they will speak to you later and La Fontaine will always remain your friend.

I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. My functions as a serving boy in the chapel entitled me to free instruction as a day boarder. There were four of us in white surplices and red skull-caps and cassocks. I was the youngest of the party and did little more than walk on. I counted as a unit; and that was about all, for I was never certain when to ring the bell or move the missal. I was all of a tremble when we gathered two on this side and two on that, with genuflection’s, in the middle of the sanctuary, to intone the Domine, salvum fac regern at the end of mass. Let me make a confession: tongue-tied with shyness, I used to leave it to the others.

Nevertheless, I was well thought of, for, in the school, I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere, there was talk of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynoegirus, the strong jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phoenician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder.

Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals, which I was far from forgetting amid this phantasmagoria of heroes and demigods. While honoring the exploits of Cadmus and Cynoegirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays [the weekly half- holiday in French schools], to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind shaken poplars. Thus was the sacred spark kept aglow, ever brighter than before.

By easy stages, I came to Virgil and was very much smitten with Meliboeus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damoetas and the rest of them. The scandals of the ancient shepherds fortunately passed unnoticed; and within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the bee, the cicada, the turtle dove, the crow, the nanny goat and the golden broom. A veritable delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.

Then, suddenly, goodbye to my studies, goodbye to Tityrus and Menalcas. Ill luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.
Amid this lamentable chaos, my love for the insect ought to have gone under. Not at all. It would have survived the raft of the Medusa. I still remember a certain pine cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennae, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark brown ground were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.

To cut a long story short: good fortune, which never abandons the brave, brought me to the primary normal school at Vaucluse where I was assured food: dried chestnuts and chickpeas. The principal, a man of broad views, soon came to trust his new assistant. He left me practically a free hand, so long as I satisfied the school curriculum, which was very modest in those days. Possessing a smattering of Latin and grammar, I was a little ahead of my fellow pupils. I took advantage of this to get some order into my vague knowledge of plants and animals. While a dictation lesson was being corrected around me, with generous assistance from the dictionary, I would examine, in the recesses of my desk, the oleander’s fruit, the snapdragon’s seed vessel, the wasp’s sting and the ground beetle’s wing-case.

With this foretaste of natural science, picked up haphazard and by stealth, I left school more deeply in love than ever with insects and flowers. And yet I had to give it all up. That wider education, which would have to be my source of livelihood in the future, demanded this imperiously. What was I to take in hand to raise me above the primary school, whose staff could barely earn their bread in those days? Natural history could not bring me anywhere. The educational system of the time kept it at a distance, as unworthy of association with Latin and Greek. Mathematics remained, with its very simple equipment: a blackboard, a bit of chalk and a few books.

So I flung myself with might and main into conic sections and the calculus: a hard battle, if ever there was one, without guides or counselors, face to face for days on end with the abstruse problem which my stubborn thinking at last stripped of its mysteries. Next came the physical sciences, studied in the same manner, with an impossible laboratory, the work of my own hands.

The reader can imagine the fate of my favorite branch of science in this fierce struggle. At the faintest sign of revolt, I lectured myself severely, lest I should let myself be seduced by some new grass, some unknown Beetle. I did violence to my feelings. My natural history books were sentenced to oblivion, relegated to the bottom of a trunk.

And so, in the end, I am sent to teach physics and chemistry at Ajaccio College. This time, the temptation is too much for me. The sea, with its wonders, the beach, whereon the tide casts such beautiful shells, the maquis of myrtles, arbutus and mastic trees: all this paradise of gorgeous nature has too much on its side in the struggle with the sine and the cosine. I succumb. My leisure time is divided into two parts. One, the larger, is allotted to mathematics, the foundation of my academical future, as planned by myself; the other is spent, with much misgiving, in botanizing and looking for the treasures of the sea. What a country and what magnificent studies to be made, if, unobsessed by x and y, I had devoted myself wholeheartedly to my inclinations!

We are the wisp of straw, the plaything of the winds. We think that we are making for a goal deliberately chosen; destiny drives us towards another. Mathematics, the exaggerated preoccupation of my youth, did me hardly any service; and animals, which I avoided as much as ever I could, are the consolation of my old age. Nevertheless, I bear no grudge against the sine and the cosine, which I continue to hold in high esteem. They cost me many a pallid hour at one time, but they always afforded me some first rate entertainment: they still do so, when my head lies tossing sleeplessly on its pillow.

Meanwhile, Ajaccio received the visit of a famous Avignon botanist, Requien by name, who, with a box crammed with paper under his arm, had long been botanizing all over Corsica, pressing and drying specimens and distributing them to his friends. We soon became acquainted. I accompanied him in my free time on his explorations and never did the master have a more attentive disciple. To tell the truth, Requien was not a man of learning so much as an enthusiastic collector. Very few would have felt capable of competing with him when it came to giving the name or the geographical distribution of a plant. A blade of grass, a pad of moss, a scab of lichen, a thread of seaweed: he knew them all. The scientific name flashed across his mind at once. What an unerring memory, what a genius for classification amid the enormous mass of things observed! I stood aghast at it. I owe much to Requien in the domain of botany. Had death spared him longer, I should doubtless have owed more to him, for his was a generous heart, ever open to the troubles of novices.

In the following year, I met Moquin-Tandon, with whom, thanks to Requien, I had already exchanged a few letters on botany. The illustrious Toulouse professor came to study on the spot the flora which he proposed to describe systematically. When he arrived, all the hotel bedrooms were reserved for the members of the general council which had been summoned; and I offered him board and lodging: a shakedown in a room overlooking the sea; fare consisting of lampreys, turbot and sea urchins: common enough dishes in that land of Cockayne, but possessing no small attraction for the naturalist, because of their novelty. My cordial proposal tempted him; he yielded to my blandishments; and there we were for a fortnight chatting at table de omni re scibili after the botanical excursion was over.

With Moquin-Tandon, new vistas opened before me. Here it was no longer the case of a nomenclator with an infallible memory: he was a naturalist with far-reaching ideas, a philosopher who soared above petty details to comprehensive views of life, a writer, a poet who knew how to clothe the naked truth in the magic mantle of the glowing word. Never again shall I sit at an intellectual feast like that: ‘Leave your mathematics,’ he said. ‘No one will take the least interest in your formula. Get to the beast, the plant; and, if, as I believe, the fever burns in your veins, you will find men to listen to you.’

We made an expedition to the center of the island, to Monte Renoso, with which I was already familiar. I made the scientist pick the hoary everlasting (Helichrysum frigidum), which makes a wonderful patch of silver; the many-headed thrift, or mouflon grass (Armeria multiceps), which the Corsicans call erba muorone; the downy marguerite (Leucanthemum tomosum) ,which, clad in wadding, shivers amid the snows; and many other rarities dear to the botanist. Moquin-Tandon was jubilant. I, on my side, was much more attracted and overcome by his words and his enthusiasm than by the hoary everlasting. When we came down from the cold mountaintop, my mind was made up: mathematics would be abandoned.

On the day before his departure, he said to me: ‘You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.’

And, taking a sharp pair of scissors from the family work-basket and a couple of needles stuck into a bit of vine shoot which served as a makeshift handle, he showed me the anatomy of a snail in a soup plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.

It is time to conclude. I was cross-examining myself, being unable to cross-examine the silent Beetle. As far as it is possible to read within myself, I answer as follows: ‘From early childhood, from the moment of my first mental awakening, I have felt drawn towards the things of nature, or, to return to our catchword, I have the gift, the bump of observation.’

After the details which I have already given about my ancestors, it would be ridiculous to look to heredity for an explanation of the fact. Nor would any one venture to suggest the words or example of my masters. Of scientific education, the fruit of college training, I had none whatever. I never set foot in a lecture hall except to undergo the ordeal of examinations. Without masters, without guides, often without books, in spite of poverty, that terrible extinguisher, I went ahead, persisted, facing my difficulties, until the indomitable bump ended by shedding its scanty contents. Yes, they were very scanty, yet possibly of some value, if circumstances had come to their assistance. I was a born animalist. Why and how? No reply.

We thus have, all of us, in different directions and in a greater or lesser degree, characteristics that brand us with a special mark, characteristics of an unfathomable origin. They exist because they exist; and that is all that any one can say. The gift is not handed down: the man of talent has a fool for a son. Nor is it acquired; but it is improved by practice. He who has not the germ of it in his veins will never possess it, in spite of all the pains of a hothouse education.

That to which we give the name of instinct when speaking of animals is something similar to genius. It is, in both cases, a peak that rises above the ordinary level. But instinct is handed down, unchanged and undiminished, throughout the sequence of a species; it is permanent and general and in this it differs greatly from genius, which is not transmissible and changes in different cases. Instinct is the inviolable heritage of the family and falls to one and all, without distinction. Here the difference ends. Independent of similarity of structure, it breaks out like genius, here or elsewhere, for no perceptible reason. Nothing causes it to be foreseen, nothing in the organization explains it. If cross- examined on this point, the Dung beetles and the rest, each with his own peculiar talent, would answer, were we able to understand them: ‘Instinct is the animal’s genius.’

CHAPTER VII THE POND

The pond, the delight of my early childhood, is still a sight whereof my old eyes never tire. What animation in that verdant world! On the warm mud of the edges, the frog’s little tadpole basks and frisks in its black legions; down in the water, the orange-bellied newt steers his way slowly with the broad rudder of his flat tail; among the reeds are stationed the flotillas of the caddis worms, half protruding from their tubes, which are now a tiny bit of stick and again a turret of little shells.

In the deep places, the water beetle dives, carrying with him his reserves of breath: an air bubble at the tip of the wing cases and, under the chest, a film of gas that gleams like a silver breastplate; on the surface, the ballet of those shimmering pearls, the whirligigs, turns and twists about; hard by there skims the unsubmersible troop of the pond skaters, who glide along with side strokes similar to those which the cobbler makes when sewing.

Here are the water boatmen, who swim on their backs with two oars spread cross-wise, and the flat water scorpions; here, squalidly clad in mud, is the grub of the largest of our dragonflies, so curious because of its manner of progression: it fills its hinder parts, a yawning funnel, with water, spurts it out again and advances just so far as the recoil of its hydraulic cannon.

The mollusks abound, a peaceful tribe. At the bottom, the plump river snails discreetly raise their lid, opening ever so little the shutters of their dwelling; on the level of the water, in the glades of the aquatic garden, the pond snails–Physa, Limnaea and Planorbis–take the air. Dark leeches writhe upon their prey, a chunk of earthworm; thousands of tiny, reddish grubs, future mosquitoes, go spinning around and twist and curve like so many graceful dolphins.

Yes, a stagnant pool, though but a few feet wide, hatched by the sun, is an immense world, an inexhaustible mine of observation to the studious man and a marvel to the child who, tired of his paper boat, diverts his eyes and thoughts a little with what is happening in the water. Let me tell what I remember of my first pond, at a time when ideas began to dawn in my seven-year-old brain.

How shall a man earn his living in my poor native village, with its inclement weather and its niggardly soil? The owner of a few acres of grazing land rears sheep. In the best parts, he scrapes the soil with the swing plow; he flattens it into terraces banked by walls of broken stones. Pannierfuls of dung are carried up on donkey-back from the cowshed. Then, in due season, comes the excellent potato, which, boiled and served hot in a basket of plaited straw, is the chief stand-by in winter.

Should the crop exceed the needs of the household, the surplus goes to feed a pig, that precious beast, a treasure of bacon and ham. The ewes supply butter and curds; the garden boasts cabbages, turnips and even a few hives in a sheltered corner. With wealth like that one can look fate in the face.

But we, we have nothing, nothing but the little house inherited by my mother and its adjoining patch of garden. The meager resources of the family are coming to an end. It is time to see to it and that quickly. What is to be done? That is the stern question which father and mother sat debating one evening.

Hop-o’-my-Thumb, hiding under the woodcutter’s stool, listened to his parents overcome by want. I also, pretending to sleep, with my elbows on the table, listen not to blood curdling designs, but to grand plans that set my heart rejoicing. This is how the matter stands: at the bottom of the village, near the church, at the spot where the water of the large roofed spring escapes from its underground weir and joins the brook in the valley, an enterprising man, back from the war, has set up a small tallow factory. He sells the scrapings of his pans, the burnt fat, reeking of candle grease, at a low price. He proclaims these wares to be excellent for fattening ducks.

“Suppose we bred some ducks,” says mother. “They sell very well in town. Henri would mind them and take them down to the brook.”

“Very well,” says father, “let’s breed some ducks. There may be difficulties in the way; but we’ll have a try.”

That night, I had dreams of paradise: I was with my ducklings, clad in their yellow suits; I took them to the pond, I watched them have their bath, I brought them back again, carrying the more tired ones in a basket.

A month or two after, the little birds of my dreams were a reality. There were twenty-four of them. They had been hatched by two hens, of whom one, the big, black one, was an inmate of the house, while the other was borrowed from a neighbor.

To bring them up, the former is sufficient, so careful is she of her adopted family. At first, everything goes perfectly: a tub with two fingers’ depth of water serves as a pond. On sunny days, the ducklings bathe in it under the anxious eye of the hen.

A fortnight later, the tub is no longer enough. It contains neither cresses crammed with tiny shellfish nor worms and tadpoles, dainty morsels both. The time has come for dives and hunts amid the tangle of the water weeds; and for us the day of trouble has also come. True, the miller, down by the brook, has fine ducks, easy and cheap to bring up; the tallow smelter, who has extolled his burnt fat so loudly, has some as well, for he has the advantage of the waste water from the spring at the bottom of the village; but how are we, right up there, at the top, to procure aquatic sports for our broods? In summer, we have hardly water to drink!

Near the house, in a freestone recess, a scanty source trickles into a basin made in the rock. . Four or five families have, like ourselves, to draw their water there with copper pails. By the time that the schoolmaster’s donkey has slaked her thirst and the neighbors have taken their provision for the day, the basin is dry. We have to wait for four-and-twenty hours for it to fill. No, this is not the hole in which the ducks would delight nor indeed in which they would be tolerated.

There remains the brook. To go down to it with the troop of ducklings is fraught with danger. On the way through the village, we might meet cats, bold ravishers of small poultry; some surly mongrel might frighten and scatter the little band; and it would be a hard puzzle to collect it in its entirety. We must avoid the traffic and take refuge in peaceful and sequestered spots.

On the hills, the path that climbs behind the chateau soon takes a sudden turn and widens into a small plain beside the meadows. It skirts a rocky slope whence trickles, level with the ground, a streamlet, forming a pond of some size. Here profound solitude reigns all day long. The ducklings will be well off; and the journey can be made in peace by a deserted footpath.

You, little man, shall take them to that delectable spot. What a day it was that marked my first appearance as a herdsman of ducks! Why must there be a jar to the even tenor of such joys? The too frequent encounter of my tender skin with the hard ground had given me a large and painful blister on the heel. Had I wanted to put on the shoes stowed away in the cupboard for Sundays and holidays, I could not. There was nothing for it but to go barefoot over the broken stones, dragging my leg and carrying high the injured heel.

Let us make a start, hobbling along, switch in hand, behind the ducks. They too, poor little things, have sensitive soles to their feet; they limp, they quack with fatigue. They would refuse to go any farther if I did not, from time to time, call a halt under the shelter of an ash.

We are there at last. The place could not be better for my birdlets; shallow, tepid water, interspersed with muddy knolls and green eyots. The diversions of the bath begin forthwith. The ducklings clap their beaks and rummage here, there and everywhere; they sift each mouthful, rejecting the clear water and retaining the good bits. In the deeper parts, they point their sterns into the air and stick their heads under water. They are happy; and it is a blessed thing to see them at work. We will let them be. It is my turn to enjoy the pond.

What is this? On the mud lie some loose, knotted, soot-colored cords. One could take them for threads of wool like those which you pull out of an old ravelly stocking. Can some shepherdess, knitting a black sock and finding her work turn out badly, have begun all over again and, in her impatience, have thrown down the wool with all the dropped stitches? It really looks like it.

I take up one of those cords in my hand. It is sticky and extremely slack; the thing slips through the fingers before they can catch hold of it. A few of the knots burst and shed their contents. What comes out is a black globule, the size of a pin’s head, followed by a flat tail. I recognize, on a very small scale, a familiar object: the tadpole, the frog’s baby. I have seen enough. Let us leave the knotted cords alone.

The next creatures please me better. They spin round on the surface of the water and their black backs gleam in the sun. If I lift a hand to seize them, that moment they disappear, I know not where. It’s a pity: I should have much liked to see them closer and to make them wriggle in a little bowl which I should have put ready for them.

Let us look at the bottom of the water, pulling aside those bunches of green string whence beads of air are rising and gathering into foam. There is something of everything underneath. I see pretty shells with compact whorls, flat as beans; I notice little worms carrying tufts and feathers; I make out some with flabby fins constantly flapping on their backs. What are they all doing there? What are their names? I do not know. And I stare at them for ever so long, held by the incomprehensible mystery of the waters.

At the place where the pond dribbles into the adjoining field are some alder trees; and here I make a glorious find. It is a scarab- -not a very large one, oh no! He is smaller than a cherry-stone, but of an unutterable blue. The angels in paradise must wear dresses of that color. I put the glorious one inside an empty snail-shell, which I plug up with a leaf. I shall admire that living jewel at my leisure, when I get back. Other distractions summon me away.

The spring that feeds the pond trickles from the rock, cold and clear. The water first collects into a cup, the size of the hollow of one’s two hands, and then runs over in a stream. These falls call for a mill: that goes without saying. Two bits of straw, artistically crossed upon an axis, provide the machinery; some flat stones set on edge afford supports. It is a great success: the mill turns admirably. My triumph would be complete, could I but share it. For want of other playmates, I invite the ducks.

Everything palls in this poor world of ours, even a mill made of two straws. Let us think of something else: let us contrive a dam to hold back the waters and form a pool. There is no lack of stones for the brickwork. I pick the most suitable; I break the larger ones. And, while collecting these blocks, suddenly I forget all about the dam which I meant to build.

On one of the broken stones, in a cavity large enough for me to put my fist in, something gleams like glass. The hollow is lined with facets gathered in sixes which flash and glitter in the sun. I have seen something like this in church, on the great saints’ days, when the light of the candles in the big chandelier kindles the stars in its hanging crystal.

We children, lying, in summer, on the straw of the threshing floor, have told one another stories of the treasures which a dragon guards underground. Those treasures now return to my mind: the names of precious stones ring out uncertainly but gloriously in my memory. I think of the king’s crown, of the princesses’ necklaces. In breaking stones, can I have found, but on a much richer scale, the thing that shines quite small in my mother’s ring? I want more such.

The dragon of the subterranean treasures treats me generously. He gives me his diamonds in such quantities that soon I possess a heap of broken stones sparkling with magnificent clusters. He does more: he gives me his gold. The trickle of water from the rock falls on a bed of fine sand which it swirls into bubbles. If I bent over towards the light, I see something like gold filings whirling where the fall touches the bottom. Is it really the famous metal of which twenty-franc pieces, so rare with us at home, are made? One would think so, from the glitter.

I take a pinch of sand and place it in my palm. The brilliant particles are numerous, but so small that I have to pick them up with a straw moistened in my mouth. Let us drop this: they are too tiny and too bothersome to collect. The big, valuable lumps must be farther on, in the thickness of the rock. We’ll come back later; we’ll blast the mountain.

I break more stones. Oh, what a queer thing has just come loose, all in one piece! It is turned spiral-wise, like certain flat snails that come out of the cracks of old walls in rainy weather. With its gnarled sides, it looks like a little ram’s horn. Shell or horn, it is very curious. How do things like that find their way into the stone?

Treasures and curiosities make my pockets bulge with pebbles. It is late and the little ducklings have had all they want to eat. Come along, youngsters, let’s go home. My blistered heel is forgotten in my excitement.
The walk back is a delight. A voice sings in my ear, an untranslatable voice, softer than any language and bewildering as a dream. It speaks to me for the first time of the mysteries of the pond; it glorifies the heavenly insect which I hear moving in the empty snail shell, its temporary cage; it whispers the secrets of the rock, the gold filings, the faceted jewels, the ram’s horn turned to stone.

Poor simpleton, smother your joy! I arrive. My parents catch sight of my bulging pockets, with their disgraceful load of stones. The cloth has given way under the rough and heavy burden.

“You rascal!” says father, at sight of the damage. “I send you to mind the ducks and you amuse yourself picking up stones, as though there weren’t enough of them all round the house! Make haste and throw them away!”

Broken hearted, I obey. Diamonds, gold dust, petrified ram’s horn, heavenly beetle are all flung on a rubbish heap outside the door.

Mother bewails her lot: “A nice thing, bringing up children to see them turn out so badly! You’ll bring me to my grave. Green stuff I don’t mind: it does for the rabbits. But stones, which ruin your pockets; poisonous animals, which’ll sting your hand: what good are they to you, silly? There’s no doubt about it: some one has thrown a spell over you!”

Yes, my poor mother, you were right, in your simplicity: a spell had been cast upon me; I admit it today. When it is hard enough to earn one’s bit of bread, does not improving one’s mind but render one more meet for suffering? Of what avail is the torment of learning to the derelicts of life?

A deal better off am I, at this late hour, dogged by poverty and knowing that the diamonds of the duck pool were rock crystal, the gold dust mica, the stone horn an Ammonite and the sky-blue beetle a Hoplia! We poor men would do better to mistrust the joys of knowledge: let us dig our furrow in the fields of the commonplace, flee the temptations of the pond, mind our ducks and leave to others, more favored by fortune, the job of explaining the world’s mechanism, if the spirit moves them.

And yet no! Alone among living creatures, man has the thirst for knowledge; he alone pries into the mysteries of things. The least among us will utter his whys and his wherefores, a fine pain unknown to the brute beast. If these questionings come from us with greater persistence, with a more imperious authority, if they divert us from the quest of lucre, life’s only object in the eyes of most men, does it become us to complain? Let us be careful not to do so, for that would be denying the best of all our gifts.

Let us strive, on the contrary, within the measure of our capacity, to force a gleam of light from the vast unknown; let us examine and question and, here and there, wrest a few shreds of truth. We shall sink under the task; in the present ill ordered state of society, we shall end, perhaps, in the workhouse. Let us go ahead for all that: our consolation shall be that we have increased by one atom the general mass of knowledge, the incomparable treasure of mankind.

As this modest lot has fallen to me, I will return to the pond, notwithstanding the wise admonitions and the bitter tears which I once owed to it. I will return to the pond, but not to that of the small ducks, the pond aflower with illusions: those ponds do not occur twice in a lifetime. For luck like that, you must be in all the new glory of your first breeches and your first ideas.

Many another have I come upon since that distant time, ponds very much richer and, moreover, explored with the ripened eye of experience. Enthusiastically I searched them with the net, stirred up their mud, ransacked their trailing weeds. None in my memories comes up to the first, magnified in its delights and mortifications by the marvelous perspective of the years.

Nor would any of them suit my plans of today. Their world is too vast. I should lose myself in their immensities, where life swarms freely in the sun. Like the ocean, they are infinite in their fruitfulness. And then any assiduous watching, undisturbed by passers by, is an impossibility on the public way. What I want is a pond on an extremely reduced scale, sparingly stocked in my own fashion an artificial pond standing permanently on my study table.

A louis has been overlooked in a corner of the drawer. I can spend it without seriously jeopardizing the domestic balance. Let me make this gift to science, who, I fear, will be none too much obliged to me. A gorgeous equipment may be all very well for laboratories wherein the cells and fibers of the dead are consulted at great expense; but such magnificence is of doubtful utility when we have to study the actions of the living. It is the humble makeshift, of no value, that stumbles on the secrets of life.

What did the best results of my studies of instinct cost me? Nothing but time and, above all, patience. My extravagant expenditure of twenty francs, therefore, will be a risky speculation if devoted to the purchase of an apparatus of study. It will bring me in nothing in the way of fresh views, of that I am convinced. However, let us try.

The blacksmith makes me the framework of a cage out of a few iron rods. The joiner, who is also a glazier on occasion–for, in my village, you have to be a Jack-of-all-trades if you would make both ends meet–sets the framework on a wooden base and supplies it with a movable board as a lid; he fixes thick panes of glass in the four sides. Behold the apparatus, complete, with a bottom of tarred sheet iron and a trap to let the water out.

The makers express themselves satisfied with their work, a singular novelty in their respective shops, where many an inquisitive caller has wondered what use I intend to make of my little glass trough. The thing creates a certain stir. Some insist that it is meant to hold my supplies of oil and to take the place of the receptacle in general use in our parts, the urn dug out of a block of stone. What would those utilitarians have thought of my crazy mind, had they known that my costly gear would merely serve to let me watch some wretched animals kicking about in the water!

Smith and glazier are content with their work. I myself am pleased. For all its rustic air, the apparatus does not lack elegance. It looks very well, standing on a little table in front of a window visited by the sun for the greater part of the day. Its holding capacity is some ten or eleven gallons. What shall we call it? An aquarium? No, that would be too pretentious and would, very unjustly, suggest the aquatic toy filled with rock work, waterfalls and goldfish beloved of the dwellers in suburbia. Let us preserve the gravity of serious things and not treat my learned trough as though it were a drawing room futility. We will call it the glass pond.

I furnish it with a heap of those limy incrustations wherewith certain springs in the neighborhood cover the dead clump of rushes. It is light, full of holes and gives a faint suggestion of a coral reef. Moreover, it is covered with a short, green, velvety moss, a downy sward of infinitesimal pond weed. I count on this modest vegetation to keep the water in a reasonably wholesome state, without driving me to frequent renewals which would disturb the work of my colonies. Sanitation and quiet are the first conditions of success. Now the stocked pond will not be long in filling itself with gases unfit to breathe, with putrid effluvia and other animal refuse; it will become a sink in which life will have killed life. Those dregs must disappear as soon as they are formed, must be burnt and purified; and from their oxidized ruins there must even rise a perfect life-giving gas, so that the water may retain an unchangeable store of the breathable element. The plant effects this purification in its sewage farm of green cells.

When the sun beats upon the glass pond, the work of the water weeds is a sight to behold. The green-carpeted reef is lit up with an infinity of scintillating points and assumes the appearance of a fairy lawn of velvet, studded with thousands of diamond pin’s heads. From this exquisite jewelry pearls break loose continuously and are at once replaced by others in the generating casket; slowly they rise, like tiny globes of light. They spread on every side. It is a constant display of fireworks in the depths of the water.

Chemistry tells us that, thanks to its green matter and the stimulus of the sun’s rays, the weeds decompose the carbonic acid gas wherewith the water is impregnated by the breathing of its inhabitants and the corruption of the organic refuse; it retains the carbon, which is wrought into fresh tissues; it exhales the oxygen in tiny bubbles. These partly dissolve in the water and partly reach the surface, where their froth supplies the atmosphere with an excess of breathable gas. The dissolved portion keeps the colonists of the pond alive and causes the unhealthy products to be oxidized and disappear.

Old hand though I be, I take an interest in this trite marvel of a bundle of weeds perpetuating hygienic principles in a stagnant pool; I look with a delighted eye upon the inexhaustible spray of spreading bubbles; I see in imagination the prehistoric times when seaweed, the first-born of plants, produced the first atmosphere for living things to breathe at the time when the silt of the continents was beginning to emerge. What I see before my eyes, between the glass panes of my trough, tells me the story of the planet surrounding itself with pure air.

CHAPTER VIII THE CADDIS WORM

Whom shall I lodge in my glass trough, kept permanently wholesome by the action of the water weeds? I shall keep caddis worms, those expert dressers. Few of the self-clothing insects surpass them in ingenious attire. The ponds in my neighborhood supply me with five or six species, each possessing an art of its own. Today, but one of these shall receive historical honors.

I obtain it from the muddy bottomed, stagnant pools crammed with small reeds. As far as one can judge from the habitation merely, it should be, according to the specialists, Limnophilus flavicornis, whose work has earned for the whole corporation the pretty name of Phryganea, a Greek term meaning a bit of wood, a stick. In a no less expressive fashion, the Provencal peasant calls it lou portofais, lou porto-caneu. This is the little grub that carries through the still waters a faggot of tiny fragments fallen from the reeds.

Its sheath, a travelling house, is a composite and barbaric piece of work, a megalithic pile wherein art, retires in favor of amorphous strength. The materials are many and sundry, so much so that we might imagine that we had the work of dissimilar builders before our eyes, if frequent transitions did not tell us the contrary.

With the young ones, the novices, it starts with a sort of deep basket in rustic wicker-work. The twigs employed present nearly always the same characteristics and are none other than bits of small, stiff roots, long steeped and peeled under water. The grub that has made a find of these fibers saws them with its mandibles and cuts them into little straight sticks, which it fixes one by one to the edge of its basket, always crosswise, perpendicular to the axis of the work.

Picture a circle surrounded by a bristling mass of tangents, or rather a polygon with its sides extended in all directions. On this assemblage of straight lines we place repeated layers of others, without troubling about similarity of position, thus obtaining a sort of ragged fascine, whose sticks project on every side. Such is the bastion of the child grub, an excellent system of defense, with its continuous pile of spikes, but difficult to steer through the tangle of aquatic plants.

Sooner or later, the worm forsakes this kind of caltrop which catches on to everything. It was a basket maker, it now turns carpenter; it builds with little beams and joists–that is to say, with round bits of wood, browned by the water, often as wide as a thick straw and a finger’s-breadth long, more or less–taking them as chance supplies them.

For the rest, there is something of everything in this rag bag: bits of stubble, fag ends of rushes, scraps of plants, fragments of some tiny twig or other, chips of wood, shreds of bark, largish grains, especially the seeds of the yellow iris, which were red when they fell from their capsules and are now black as jet.

The heterogeneous collection is piled up anyhow. Some pieces are fixed lengthwise, others across, others aslant. There are angles in this direction and angles in the other, resulting in sharp little turns and twists; the big is mixed with the little, the correct rubs shoulders with the shapeless. It is not an edifice, it is a frenzied conglomeration. Sometimes, a fine disorder is an effect of art. This is not so here: the work of the Caddis worm is not a masterpiece worth signing.

And this mad heaping up follows straight upon the regular basket work of the start. The young grub’s fascine did not lack a certain elegance, with its dainty laths, all stacked crosswise, methodically; and, lo and behold, the builder, grown larger, more experienced and, one would think, more skilful, abandons the orderly plan to adopt another which is wild and incoherent! There is no transition stage between the two systems. The extravagant pile rises abruptly from the original basket. But that we often find the two kinds of work placed one above the other, we would not dare ascribe to them a common origin. The fact of their being joined together is the only thing that makes them one, in spite of the incongruity.

But the two storeys do not last indefinitely. When the worm has grown slightly and is housed to its satisfaction in a heap of joists, it abandons the basket of its childhood, which has become too narrow and is now a troublesome burden. It cuts through its sheath, lops off and lets go the stern, the original work. When moving to a higher and roomier flat, it understands how to lighten its portable house by breaking off a part of it. All that remains is the upper floor, which is enlarged at the aperture, as and when required, by the same architecture of disordered beams.

Side by side with these cases, which are mere ugly faggots, we find others just as often of exquisite beauty and composed entirely of tiny shells. Do they come from the same workshop? It takes very convincing proofs to make us believe this. Here is order with its charm, there disorder with its hideousness; on the one hand a dainty mosaic of shells, on the other a clumsy heap of sticks. And yet it is all produced by the same laborer.

Proofs abound. On some case which offends the eye with the want of arrangement in its bits of wood, patches are apt to appear which are quite regular and made of shells; in the same way, it is not unusual to see a horrid tangle of joists braced to a masterpiece of shell work. One feels a certain annoyance at seeing the pretty sheath so barbarously spoilt.

This mixed construction tells us that the rustic stacker of wooden beams excels, when occasion offers, in making elegant shell pavements and that it practices rough carpentry and delicate mosaic work indifferently. In the latter instance, the scabbard is made, above all, of Planorbes, selected among the smaller of these pond snails and laid flat. Without being scrupulously regular, the work, at its best, does not lack merit. The pretty, close-whorled spirals, placed one against the other on the same level, have a very pleasing general effect. No pilgrim returning from Santiago de Compostella ever slung handsomer tippet from his shoulders.

But only too often the caddis worm dashes ahead, regardless of proportion. The big is joined to the small, the exaggerated suddenly stands out, to the great detriment of order. Side by side with tiny Planorbes, each at most the size of a lentil, others are fixed as large as one’s fingernail; and these cannot possibly be fitted in correctly. They overlap the regular parts and spoil their finish.

To crown the disorder, the caddis worm adds to the flat spirals any dead shell that comes handy, without distinction of species, provided it be not excessively large. I notice, in its collection of bric-a-brac, the Physa, the Paludina, the Limnaea, the Amber snail [all pond snails] and even the Pisidium [a bivalve], that little twin-valved casket.

Land shells, swept into the ditches by the rains after the inmate’s death, are accepted quite as readily. In the work made of the Mollusk’s cast-off clothing, I find encrusted the spindle shell of the Clausilium, the key shell of the pupa, the spiral of the smaller Helix, the yawning volute of the Vitrina, or glass snail, the turret shell of the Bulimus [all land snails], denizens all of the fields. In short, the caddis worm builds with more or less everything that comes from the plant or the dead mollusk. Among the diversified refuse of the pond, the only materials rejected are those of a gravelly nature. Stone and pebble are excluded from the building with a care that is very rarely absent. This is a question of hydrostatics to which we will return presently. For the moment, let us try to follow the construction of the scabbard.

In a tumbler small enough to allow of easy and precise observation, I install three or four caddis worms, extracted this moment from their sheaths with every possible precaution. After a number of attempts which have at last shown me the right road, I place at their disposal two kinds of materials, possessing opposite qualities; the supple and the firm, the soft and the hard. On the one hand, we have a live aquatic plant, such as watercress, for instance, or ombrelle d’eau, having at its base a tufty bunch of fine white roots about as thick as a horsehair. In these soft tresses, the caddis worm, which observes a vegetarian diet, will find at one and the same time the wherewithal to build and eat. On the other hand, we have a little faggot of bits of wood, very dry, equal in length and each possessing the thickness of a good sized pin. The two sorts of building material lie side by side, mingling their threads and sticks. The animal can make its choice from the lump.

A few hours later, having recovered from the shock of losing its sheath, the caddis worm sets to work to manufacture a new one. It settles across a bunch of tangled rootlets, which are brought together by the builder’s legs and more or less arranged by the undulating movement of the hinder part. This gives a kind of incoherent and ill defined suspended belt, a narrow hammock with a number of loose catches; for the various bits of which it is made up are respected by the teeth and extended from place to place beyond the main cords of the roots. Here, without much trouble, is the support, suitably fixed by natural moorings. A few threads of silk, casually distributed, make the frail combination a trifle more secure.

And now to the work of building. Supported by the suspended belt, the caddis worm stretches itself and thrusts out its middle legs, which, being longer than the others, are the grapnels intended to seize things at a distance. It meets a bit of root, fastens on to it, climbs above the point gripped, as though it were measuring the piece to a requisite length, and then, with the fine scissors of its mandibles, cuts the string.

There is at once a brief recoil, which brings the animal back to the level of the hammock. The bit detached lies across the worm’s chest, held in its forelegs, which turn it, twist it, wave it about, lay it down, lift it up, as though trying for the best position. Those forelegs make admirably dexterous arms. Being less long than the other two pairs, they are brought into immediate contact with those primordial implements, the mandibles and the spinneret. Their delicate terminal jointing, with a movable and crooked finger, is the caddis worm’s equivalent of our hand. They are the working legs. The second pair, which are exceptionally long, serve to spear distant materials and to give the worker a firm footing when measuring a piece and cutting it with the pliers. Lastly, the hind legs, of medium length, afford a support when the others are busy.

The caddis worm, I was saying, with the piece which it has removed held crosswise to its chest, retreats a little way along its suspended hammock until the spinneret is level with the support furnished by the close tangle of rootlets. With a quick movement, it shifts its burden, gets it as nearly by the middle as it can, so that the two ends stick out equally on either side, and chooses the spot to place it, whereupon the spinneret sets to work at once, while the little fore legs hold the scrap of root motionless in its transversal position. The soldering is effected with a touch of silk in the middle of the bit and along a certain distance to the right and left, as far as the bending of the head permits.

Without delay, other sticks are speared in like manner at a distance, cut off and placed in position. As the immediate neighborhood is stripped, the material is gathered at a yet greater distance and the caddis worm bends even farther from its support, which now holds only its last few segments. It is a curious gymnastic display, that of this soft, hanging spine turning and swaying, while the grapnels feel in every direction for a thread.

All this labor results in a sort of casing of little white cords. The work lacks firmness and regularity. Nevertheless, judging by the builder’s methods, I can see that the building would not be devoid of merit if the materials gave it a better chance. The caddis worm estimates the size of its pieces very fairly; it cuts them all to nearly the same length; it always arranges them crosswise on the margin of the case; it fixes them by the middle.

Nor is this all: the manner of working helps the general arrangement considerably. When the bricklayer is building the narrow shaft of a factory chimney, he stands in the center of his turret and turns round and round while gradually laying new rows. The caddis worm acts in the same way. It twists round in its sheath; it adopts without inconvenience whatever position it pleases, so as to bring its spinneret full face with the point to be gummed. There is no straining of the neck to left or right, no throwing back of the head to reach points behind. The animal has constantly before it, within the exact range of its implements, the place at which the bit is to be fixed. When the piece is soldered, the worm turns a little aside, to a length equal to that of the last soldering, and here, along an extent which hardly ever varies, an extent determined by the swing which its head is able to give, it fixes the next piece.

These several conditions ought to result in a geometrically ordered dwelling, having a regular polygon as an opening. Then how comes it that the cylinder of bits of root is so confused, so clumsily fashioned? The reason is this: the worker possesses talent, but the materials do not lend themselves to accurate work. The rootlets supply stumps of very uneven shape and thickness. They include big and small ones, straight and bent, simple and ramified. To combine all these dissimilar pieces into an orderly whole is hardly possible, all the more so as the caddis worm does not appear to attach very much importance to its cylinder, which is a temporary work, hurriedly constructed to afford a speedy shelter. Matters are urgent; and very soft fibers, clipped with a bite of the mandibles, are more quickly gathered and more easily put together than joists, which require the patient work of the saw. The inaccurate cylinder, in short, held in position by numerous guy ropes, is a base upon which a solid and definite structure will rise before long. Soon, the original work will crumble to ruins and disappear, whereas the new one, a permanent structure, will even outlast the owner.

The insects reared in a tumbler show yet another method of building the first dwelling. This time, the caddis worm is given a few very leafy stalks of pond weed (Potamogeton densum) and a bundle of small dry twigs. It perches on a leaf, which the nippers of the mandibles cut half across. The portion left untouched will act as a lanyard and give the necessary steadiness to the early operations.

From an adjoining leaf a section is cut out entirely, an angular and good sized piece. There is plenty of material and no need for economy. The piece is soldered with silk to the strip which was not wholly cut off. The result of three or four similar operations is to surround the Caddis worm with a conical bag, whose wide mouth is scalloped with pointed and very irregular notches. The work of the nippers continues; fresh pieces are fixed, from one to another, inside the funnel, not far from the edge, so that the bag lengthens, tapers and ends by wrapping the animal in a light and floating drapery.

Thus clad for the time being, either in the fine silk of the pond weed or in the linsey-woolsey supplied by the roots of the watercress, the caddis worm begins to think of building a more solid sheath. The present casing will serve as a foundation for the stronger building. But the necessary materials are seldom near at hand: you have to go and fetch them, you have to move your position, an effort which has been avoided until now. With this object, the caddis worm cuts its moorings, that is to say, the rootlets which keep the cylinder fixed, or else the half-severed leaf of pond weed on which the cone-shaped bag has come into being.

The worm is now free. The smallness of the artificial pond, the tumbler, soon brings it into touch with what it is seeking. This is a little faggot of dry twigs, which I have selected of equal length and of slight thickness. Displaying greater care than it did when treating the slender roots, the carpenter measures out the requisite length on the joist. The distance to which it has to extend its body in order to reach the point where the break will be made tells it pretty accurately what length of stick it wants.

The piece is patiently sawn off with the mandibles; it is next taken in the fore legs and held crosswise below the neck. The backward movement which brings the caddis worm home also brings the bit of twig to the edge of the tube. Thereupon, the methods employed in working with the scraps of root are renewed in precisely the same manner. The sticks are scaffolded to the regulation height, all alike in length, amply soldered in the middle and free at either end.

With the picked materials provided, the carpenter has turned out a work of some elegance. The joists are all arranged crosswise, because this way is the handiest for carrying the sticks and putting them in position; they are fixed by the middle, because the two arms that hold the stick while the spinneret does its work require an equal grasp on either side; each soldering covers a length which is seen to be practically invariable, because it is equal to the width described by the head in bending first to this side and then to that when the silk is emitted; the whole assumes a polygonal shape, not far removed from a rectilinear pentagon, because, between laying one piece and the next, the caddis worm turns by the width of an arc corresponding with the length of a soldering. The regularity of the method produces the regularity of the work; but it is essential, of course, that the materials should lend themselves to precise coordination.

In its natural pond, the caddis worm does not often have at its disposal the picked joists which I give it in the tumbler. It comes across something of everything; and that something of everything it employs as it finds
it. Bits of wood, large seeds, empty shells, stubble stalks, shapeless fragments are used in the building for better or for worse, just as they occur, without being trimmed by the saw; and this jumble, the result of chance, results in a shockingly faulty structure.

The caddis worm does not forget its talents; but it lacks choice pieces. Give it a proper timber yard and it at once reverts to correct architecture, of which it carries the plans within itself. With small, dead pond snails, all of the same size, it fashions a splendid patchwork scabbard; with a cluster of slender roots, reduced by rotting to their stiff, straight, woody axis, it manufactures pretty specimens of wicker work which could serve as models to our basket makers.

Let us watch it at work when it is unable to use its favorite joist. There is no point in giving it clumsy building stones; that would only bring us back to the uncouth sheaths. Its propensity to make use of soaked seeds, those of the iris, for instance, suggests that I might try grains. I select rice, which, because of its hardness, will be tantamount to wood and, because of its clean whiteness and its oval shape, will lend itself to artistic masonry.

Obviously, my denuded caddis worms cannot start their work with bricks of this kind. Where would they fix their first layer? They must have a foundation, quick and easy to build. This is once more supplied by a temporary cylinder of watercress roots. On this support follow the grains of rice, which, grouped one atop the other, straight or slanting, end by giving a magnificent turret of ivory. Next to the sheaths made of tiny snail shells, this is the prettiest thing with which the caddis worm’s industry has furnished me. A fine sense of order has returned, because the materials, regular and of identical character, have cooperated with the correct method of the worker.

The two demonstrations are enough. Sticks and grains of rice make it plain that the caddis worm is not the bungler that one would expect from the monstrous buildings in the pond. Those Cyclopean piles, those mad conglomerations, are the inevitable results of chance finds, which are used for the best because there is no choice. The water carpenter has an art of its own, has method and rules of symmetry. When well served by fortune, it is quite able to turn out good work; when ill-served, it acts like others: the work which it turns out is bad. Poverty makes for ugliness.

There is another matter wherein the caddis worm deserves our attention. With a perseverance which repeated trials do not tire, it makes itself a new tube when I strip it. This is opposed to the habits of the generality of insects, which do not recommence the thing once done, but simply continue it according to the usual rules, taking no account of the ruined or vanished portions. The caddis worm is a striking exception: it starts again. Whence does it derive this capacity?

I begin by learning that, given a sudden alarm, it readily leaves