THE WORKS OF J. H. FABRE THE LIFE OF THE WEEVIL BY J. HENRI FABRE Translated by ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS, F.Z.S. HODDER AND STOUGHTON LIMITED LONDON TRANSLATOR’S NOTE I have gathered into this volume the essays on Weevils contained in the Souvenirs entomologiques, lest I should swell unduly the number of volumes devoted to Beetles, of which there will be three in all, or four if we include the present book. Chapters I. and VII. to IX. have already appeared, wholly or in part, in an illustrated miscellany, entitled The Life and Love of the Insect, translated by myself and published by Messrs. Adam and Charles Black (in America by the Macmillan Co.), and Chapter V. and parts of Chapters XI. and XII. in a similar volume, entitled Social Life in the Insect World, translated by Mr. Bernard Miall and published by Messrs. T. Fisher Unwin Ltd. (in America by the Century Co.). I am permitted by arrangement with the firms named to retranslate and reissue the chapters in question for the purpose of this collected and definitive edition of Fabre’s entomological works. I am also under no small obligation to Mr. Miall, who has given me the benefit of his assistance throughout. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. CONTENTS PAGE TRANSLATOR’S NOTE V CHAPTER I THE OLD WEEVILS 1 CHAPTER II THE SPOTTED LARINUS 18 CHAPTER III THE BEAR LARINUS 43 CHAPTER IV THE BOTANICAL INSTINCT 58 CHAPTER V THE ELEPHANT WEEVIL 71 CHAPTER VI THE NUT-WEEVIL 94 CHAPTER VII THE POPLAR-WEEVIL 112 CHAPTER VIII THE VINE-WEEVIL 127 CHAPTER IX OTHER LEAF-ROLLERS 140 CHAPTER X THE SLOE-WEEVIL 157 CHAPTER XI THE PEA-WEEVIL: THE EGGS 184 CHAPTER XII THE PEA-WEEVIL: THE LARVA 199 CHAPTER XIII THE HARICOT-WEEVIL 213 CHAPTER XIV THE IRIS-WEEVIL 235 CHAPTER XV THE CIONUS 246 INDEX 275 CHAPTER I THE OLD WEEVILS In winter, when the insect takes an enforced rest, the study of numismatics affords me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins, scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns the sod. He brings them to me and consults me upon their pecuniary value, never upon their meaning. What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove! Men suffered of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future: to him all history is summed up in that! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime of the idle. I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the past. I scratch the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully strip it of its earthy rind, I examine it with the magnifying-glass, I try to decipher its lettering. And my satisfaction is no small one when the bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read a page of humanity, not in books, which are chroniclers open to suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were contemporary with the persons and the facts. This bit of silver, flattened with the die, speaks to me of the Vocontii. [1] ‘VOOC ... VOCUNT,’ says the inscription. It comes from the small neighbouring town of Vaison, where Pliny the naturalist [2] sometimes spent a holiday. Here perhaps, at his host’s table, the celebrated compiler learnt to appreciate the Beccafico, [3] famous among the Roman epicures and still renowned to-day, under the name of Grasset, among our Provençal gastronomers. It is a pity that my bit of silver says nothing of these events, more memorable than any battle. It shows on one side a head and on the other a galloping horse, all barbarously inaccurate. A child trying its hand for the first time with a sharp-pointed stone on the fresh mortar of the walls would produce no more shapeless design. No, of a surety, those bold Allobroges were no artists. How greatly superior to them were the foreigners from Phocæa! Here is a drachma of the Massalietes: [4] ΜΑΣΣΑΛΙΗΤΩΝ. On the obverse, a head of Diana of Ephesus, chub-faced, full-cheeked, thick-lipped. A receding forehead, surmounted by a diadem; an abundant head of hair, streaming down the neck in a cascade of curls; heavy ear-drops, a pearl necklace, a bow slung over the shoulder. Thus was the idol decked by the hands of the pious Syrian. To tell the truth, it is not æsthetic. It is sumptuous, if you will, and preferable, after all, to the donkey’s-ears which our modern beauties wear perched upon their heads. What a singular freak is fashion, so fertile in the means of uglification! Commerce knows nothing of loveliness, says this divinity of the traders; it prefers profit, embellished with luxury. So speaks the drachma. On the reverse, a lion clawing the ground and roaring wide-mouthed. Not of to-day alone is the savagery that symbolizes power in the shape of some formidable brute, as though evil were the supreme expression of strength. The eagle, the lion and other marauders often figure on the reverse of coins. But reality is not sufficient; the imagination invents monstrosities: the centaur, the dragon, the griffin, the unicorn, the double-headed eagle. Are the inventors of these emblems so greatly superior to the Redskin who celebrates the prowess of his scalping-knife with a Bear’s paw, a Falcon’s wing or a Puma’s tooth stuck in his hair? We may safely doubt it. How preferable to these heraldic horrors is the reverse of our own silver coinage recently brought into circulation! It represents a sower who, with a nimble hand, at sunrise, fills the furrows with the good seed of thought. It is very simple and it is great; it makes us reflect. The Marseilles drachma has for its sole merit its magnificent relief. The artist who made the dies was a master of the graver’s tool; but he lacked the breath of inspiration. His chub-faced Diana is no better than a trollop. Here is the NAMASAT of the Volscæ, which became the colony of Nîmes. Side by side, profiles of Augustus and of his minister Agrippa. The former, with his dour forehead, his flat skull, his acquisitive broken nose, inspires me with but little confidence, notwithstanding what gentle Virgil said of him: Deus nobis hæc otia fecit. [5] It is success that makes gods. Had he not succeeded in his criminal projects, Augustus the divine would have remained Octavius the scoundrel. His minister pleases me better. He was a great mover of stones, who, with his building operations, his aqueducts and his roads, came and civilized the rude Volscæ a little. Not far from my village a splendid road crosses the plain, starting from the banks of the Aygues, and climbs up yonder, tedious in its monotonous length, to cross the Sérignan hills, under the protection of a mighty oppidum, which, much later, became the old castle, the castelas. It is a section of Agrippa’s Road, which joined Marseilles and Vienne. The majestic ribbon, twenty centuries old, is still frequented. We no longer see the little brown foot-soldier of the Roman legions upon it; in his stead we see the peasant going to market at Orange, with his flock of Sheep or his drove of unruly Porkers. Of the two I prefer the peasant. Let us turn over our green-crusted penny. ‘COL. NEM.,’ [6] the reverse tells us. The inscription is accompanied by a Crocodile chained to a palm-tree from which hang crowns. It is an emblem of Egypt, conquered by the veterans who founded the colony. The beast typifying the Nile gnashes its teeth at the foot of the familiar tree. It speaks to us of Antony, the Don Juan; it tells us of Cleopatra, whose nose, had it been an inch shorter, would have changed the face of the globe. Thanks to the memories which it awakens, the scaly-backed reptile becomes a superb historical lesson. In this way, the important lessons of the numismatics of metals might be continued for many a day and be constantly varied without departing from my immediate neighbourhood. But there is another science of numismatics, far superior and less costly, which, with its medals, the fossils, tells us the history of life. I refer to the numismatics of stones. My very window-sill, the confidant of bygone ages, talks to me of a vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, whose every particle retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived. Prickly spines of Sea-urchins, teeth and vertebræ of fish, broken pieces of shells and fragments of madrepores form a conglomeration of dead existences. Examined stone by stone, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a rag-fair of ancient things that were once alive. The rocky stratum from which we extract our building materials in these parts covers with its mighty shell the greater portion of the neighbouring uplands. Here the quarryman has been digging for none knows how many centuries, perhaps since the time when Agrippa hewed Cyclopean blocks to form the stages and the face of the theatre at Orange. And here daily the pick-axe uncovers curious fossils. The most remarkable of these are teeth, still wonderfully polished in the midst of their rough matrix and as bright with enamel as in the fresh state. Some of them are formidable, three-cornered, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as a man’s hand. What a yawning gulf, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet! What mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those notched shears! You shiver at the mere thought of reconstructing that awful implement of destruction! The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the family of the Squali. Palæontology calls him Carcharodon megalodon. Our modern Shark, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as a dwarf can give an idea of a giant. Other Squali, all ferocious gluttons, abound within the same stone. It contains Oxyrhinæ (O. xyphodon, Agass.), whose jaws are furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiæ (L. denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with sharp, flexuous daggers, flat on one side, convex on the other; and Notidani (N. primigenius, Agass.), whose sunken teeth are crowned with radiating indentations. This dental arsenal, bearing eloquent witness to bygone massacres, can hold its own with the Nîmes Crocodile, the Marseilles Diana or the Vaison Horse. With its panoply of carnage, it tells me how extermination came at all times to prune the excess of life; it says: ‘On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a splinter of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with warlike devourers and peaceful victims. A deep inlet occupied the future site of the Rhone valley. Its billows broke not far from your house.’ Here in fact are the cliffs of the shore, in such a state of preservation that, when I concentrate my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of curving billows. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, [7] Petricolæ, [8] Pholades [9] have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one’s fist; circular cells; cabins with a narrow opening through which the recluse received the incoming water, laden with food and constantly renewed. Sometimes the erstwhile occupant is there, mineralized, intact to the smallest details of his striæ, of his scales, a brittle ornamentation; more often he has disappeared, fallen into decay, and his house has filled with a fine sea-mud, hardened into a chalky kernel. In this quiet inlet, collected by some eddy from the surrounding sea-bed and sunk to the bottom of the oozes, now turned into marl, there are stupendous deposits of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up Oysters eighteen inches long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could scoop up from this enormous heap Scallops, Coni, [10] Cytheres, [11] Mactræ, [12] Murices, [13] Turritellæ, [14] Mitræ [15] and others too numerous, too innumerable, to mention. You stand stupefied before the intense vitality of the days of old, which was able to supply us with such a mass of relics in a mere hole in the ground. This necropolis of shells tells us also that time, that patient renewer of the harmony of things, has mown down not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays the neighbouring sea, the Mediterranean, contains hardly anything identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of resemblance between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the tropical seas. The climate therefore has become colder; the sun is slowly approaching extinction; the species are dying out. Thus I am told by the numismatics of my stone window-sill. Without leaving my field of observation, so modest and restricted and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and this time on the subject of the insect. The country around Apt abounds in a curious rock that breaks off in flakes, not unlike sheets of whity-grey cardboard, which burn with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell. It was deposited at the bottom of the great lakes haunted by Crocodiles and giant Tortoises. Those lakes were never beheld by human eye. Their basins have been replaced by the range of the hills; their muds, slowly deposited in thin layers, have become mighty ridges of stone. Let us remove a slab and subdivide it into flakes with the point of a knife, a task as easy as separating the superimposed sheets of a piece of paste-board. In so doing we are examining a volume taken from the library of the mountains; we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to any Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams, nay better, realities converted into pictures. Here is a page of fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Backbone, fins, vertebral column, the little bones of the head, the crystalline lens turned into a black globule: all is there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel tempted to scratch a bit off with our finger and taste this super-secular preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum. There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the deficiency. It tells us: ‘These fish lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly a spate came, asphyxiating them in its mud-thickened torrent. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, they have endured through time and will endure indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.’ The same flood brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so much so that the lacustrian deposit tells also of things on land. It is a general record of the life of the time. Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather of our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves outlined in brown impressions. The stone herbal rivals the botanical clearness of our ordinary herbals. It repeats what the shells have already taught us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in the old days; it no longer includes palm-trees, laurels oozing with camphor, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions. Continue to turn the pages. We now come to insects. The most frequent are Diptera, of moderate size, often very humble Flies and Gnats. The teeth of the great Squali surprised us by their smooth polish amid the roughness of their chalky matrix. What shall we say of these frail Midges enshrined intact in their marly reliquary? The feeble creature, which our fingers could not pick up without crushing it, remains undisturbed beneath the weight of the mountains! The six slender legs, which the least touch is enough to disjoint, lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape and arrangement, in the attitude of the insect at rest. There is nothing lacking, not even the tiny double claws at the end of the tarsi. Here are the two wings, unfurled. The fine network of their veins can be studied under the lens as clearly as in the Fly of our collections, stuck on a pin. The antennary plumes have lost none of their fragile grace; the abdomen gives us the number of the segments, edged with a row of specks which once were cilia. Even the carcase of a Mastodon, defying time in its sandy bed, fills us with amazement; a Gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination. Certainly, the Mosquito, borne along by the floods, did not come from far away. Before he arrived, some turbulent streamlet must have reduced him to the nothingness to which he was already so near. Slain by the joys of a morning—a long life for a Gnat—he fell from the top of his reed, was straightway drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs. Who are these others, these dumpy creatures, with hard, convex wing-cases, which next to the Flies are the most numerous. Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us beyond dispute. They are proboscidian Beetles, Rhynchophoræ, or, in simpler terms, Weevils. There are small ones, middling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day. Their position on the limestone slab is not as correct as the Mosquito’s. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum, is now hidden under the breast, now projects forward. Some display it in profile; others—more frequent these—stretch it to one side, as the result of a twisted neck. These contorted insects, with their dislocated members, did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Flies. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants by the shore, the others, the majority, come from the surrounding parts, carried by the rain-water, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as twigs and stones. A suit of armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way to some extent; and the muddy winding-sheet received the drowned Beetles as the ravages of the journey left them. These strangers, coming perhaps from afar, supply us with valuable information. They tell us that, if the shores of the gulf had the Mosquito as chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil. Apart from the snout-bearing family, the pages of my Apt rock show me scarcely anything else, especially in the order of the Beetles. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, [16] the Dung-beetle, [17] the Capricorn, [18] whom the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvest, would have brought to the lake even as it did the Weevil? There is not the least vestige of those tribes, so prosperous to-day. Where are the Hydrophilus, [19] the Gyrinus, [20] the Dytiscus, [21] all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had every chance of being handed down to us as mummies between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they used to live in the lake, whose mud would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more effectually than the little fishes and more especially the Fly. Well, of these aquatic Beetles there is no trace either. Where were they, where were those who are missing from the geological reliquary? Where were the inhabitants of the thickets, of the green-swards, of the worm-eaten tree-trunks: Capricorns, borers of wood; Sacred Beetles, workers in dung; Carabi, disembowellers of game? One and all were in the limbo of the time to come. The present of that period did not possess them; the future awaited them. The Weevil, if I may credit the modest records which I am able to consult, must therefore be the oldest of the Beetles. In the beginning, life fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the saurian, it revelled at first in monsters from fifteen to twenty yards long. It placed horns upon their noses and above their eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, and hollowed their necks into spiny pouches wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though with no great success, to give them wings. After these horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down and produced the charming Green Lizard of our hedges. When it invented the bird, it filled its beak with the reptile’s pointed teeth and suspended from its rump a long, feather-clad tail. These indeterminate and revoltingly hideous creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove. All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot’s brain. The prehistoric animal is first and foremost an atrocious machine for grabbing, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later. The Weevil, in his fashion, repeats these aberrations to a certain extent. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut four-square; elsewhere a foolish reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouth, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on either side, the antennæ, with their first joints fitting into a groove. What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose? Where did the insect find the model for it? Nowhere. The Weevil invented it and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Beetle indulges in these nasal eccentricities. Observe also the smallness of the head, a bulb that hardly swells beyond the base of the snout. What can it have inside? A very poor nervous equipment, the sign of exceedingly limited instincts. Before seeing them at work, we have a poor opinion of the intelligence of these microcephalics; we class them among the obtuse, among creatures deprived of industry. These surmises will not be greatly belied. Though the Weevil be but little glorified by his talents, this is no reason for despising him. As we learn from the lacustrian schists, he was in the van of the insects with the armoured wing-cases; he was long stages ahead of those which were working out new forms within the limits of the possible. He speaks to us of primitive shapes, sometimes so quaint; he is in his own little world what the bird with the toothed mandibles and the saurian with the horned eyebrows are in a higher world. In ever-thriving legions, he has come down to us without changing his characteristics. He is to-day as he was in the youth of the continents: the pictures on the chalky slates proclaim the fact aloud. Under any such picture I would venture to write the name of the genus, sometimes even of the species. Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form. By consulting the modern Weevil we shall therefore obtain a chapter closely approximate to the biology of his predecessors at the time when Provence was a land of great lakes shaded by palm-trees and filled with Crocodiles. The history of the present will teach us the history of the past. CHAPTER II THE SPOTTED LARINUS Larinus is a vague term, which cannot teach us anything. The word sounds well. It is something not to afflict the ear with raucous spittings; but the prentice reader wants more than this. He expects the name to give him, in euphonious syllables, a brief description of the insect named. This would help to guide him in the midst of the vast multitude. I cordially agree with him, while recognizing what an arduous task it would be to devise a rational nomenclature that would give the beasts the forenames and surnames which they deserve. Our ignorance condemns us to be vague and often nonsensical. Let us consider a case in point. What does Larinus mean? The Greek lexicon tells us: Λαρινός, fatty, fat. Has the insect which is the subject of this chapter any right to such a description? Not at all. It is corpulent, I agree, as are the Weevils generally, but does not more than another deserve a certificate of obesity. Let us look a little deeper. Λαρός means pleasant to the taste, pleasant to the eye, dainty, sweet. Are we there now? Not yet. To be sure, the Larinus is not without daintiness, but how many among the long-nosed Beetles excel him in beauty of costume! Our osier-beds provide nourishment for some that are flecked with flowers of sulphur, some that are laced with Chinese white, some that are powdered with malachite-green. They leave on our fingers a scaly dust that looks as though it were gathered from a Butterfly’s wing. Our vines and poplar-trees have some that surpass copper pyrites in metallic lustre; the equatorial countries furnish specimens of unparalleled magnificence, true gems beside which the marvels of our jewel-cases would pale. No, the modest Larinus has no right to be extolled as superb. The title of dandy must be awarded to others, in the beak-bearing family, rather than to him. If his godfather, better-informed, had named him after his habits, he would have called him an artichoke-thief. The group of the Larini, in fact, establishes its offspring in the fleshy base of the flowers of the Carduaceæ, the thistle, the cotton-thistle, the centaury, the carline thistle and others, which, in structure and flavour, recall more or less remotely the artichoke of our tables. This is its special province. The Larinus is charged with the thinning out of the fierce, encroaching thistle. Glance at the pink, white or blue heads of a Carduacea. Long-beaked insects swarm, awkwardly diving into the mass of florets. What are they? Larini. Open the head, split its fleshy base. Surprised by the air and by the light, plump, white, legless grubs sway to and fro, each isolated in a small recess. What are these grubs? Larinus-larvæ. Here accuracy calls for a reservation. A few other Weevils, related to those whose history we are considering, are also partial, on behalf of their family, to the fleshy receptacles with the artichoke flavour. No matter: the species that take the lead in numbers, frequency and handsome proportions are the authorized exterminators of the thistle-heads. Now the reader knows as much as I can tell him. All the summer, all the autumn, until the cold weather sets in, the most ornamental of our southern thistles grows profusely by the roadside. Its pretty, blue flowers, gathered into round, prickly heads, have won it the botanical name of Echinops, in allusion to the Hedgehog rolled into a ball. It is indeed like a Hedgehog. Better still: it is like a Sea-urchin stuck upon a stalk and turned into an azure globe. Beneath a screen of star-shaped flowerets the shapely tuft hides the thousand daggers of its scales. Whosoever touches it with an incautious finger is surprised to encounter such aggressiveness beneath an innocent appearance. The leaves that go with it, green above, white and fluffy underneath, do at least warn the inexperienced: they are divided into pointed lobes, each of which bears an extremely sharp needle at its tip. This thistle is the patrimony of the Spotted Larinus (L. maculosus, Sch.), whose back is powdered with cloudy yellow patches. The Weevil browses very sparingly on the leaves. June is not yet over before she is exploiting the heads, green at this time and the size of peas, or at most of cherries, with a view to establishing her family. For two or three weeks the work of colonization continues on globes which grow bluer and larger day by day. Couples are formed, very peaceably, in the glad morning sunlight. The nuptial preliminaries, resembling the embraces of jointed levers, display a rustic awkwardness. With his fore-legs the male Weevil masters his spouse; with his hinder tarsi, gently and at intervals, he strokes her sides. Alternating with these soft caresses are sudden jolts and impetuous jerks. Meanwhile, the object of these attentions, in order to lose no time, works at the thistle-head with her beak and prepares the lodging for her egg. Even in the midst of her wedding the care of the family leaves this laborious insect no repose. What precisely is the use of the Weevil’s rostrum, this paradoxical nose, such as no carnival mummer would venture to wear? We shall find out at leisure, taking our own time. My prisoners, enclosed in a wire-gauze cover, are working in the sunlight on my window-sill. A couple has just broken apart. Careless of what will happen next, the male retires to browse for a while, not on the blue thistle-heads, which are choice morsels reserved for the young, but on the leaves, where a superficial scraping enables the beak to remove some frugal mouthfuls. The mother remains where she is and continues the boring already commenced. The rostrum is driven right into the ball of florets and disappears from sight. The insect hardly moves, taking at most a few slow strides now in one direction, now in another. What we see is not the work of a gimlet, which twists, but of an awl, which sinks steadily downwards. The mandibles, the sharp shears affixed to the implement, bite and dig; and that is all. In the end, the rostrum used as a lever, that is to say, bending upon its base, uproots and lifts the detached florets and pushes them a little way outwards. This must cause the slight unevenness which we perceive at any inhabited point. The work of excavation lasts a good quarter of an hour. Then the mother turns about, finds the opening of the shaft with the tip of her belly and lays the egg. But how? The pregnant insect’s abdomen is far too large and too blunt to enter the narrow passage and deposit the egg directly at the bottom. A special tool, a probe carrying the egg to the point required, is therefore absolutely needed here. But the insect does not possess one that shows; and things take place so swiftly and discreetly that I see nothing of that kind unsheathed. No matter, I am positively convinced of it: to place the egg at the bottom of the shaft which the rostrum has just bored, the mother must possess a guide-rod, a rigid tube, kept in reserve, invisible, among her tools. We shall return to this curious subject when more conclusive instances arise. One first point is gained: the Weevil’s rostrum, that nose which at first sight was deemed grotesque, is in reality an instrument of maternal love. The extravagant becomes the everyday, the indispensable. Since it carries mandibles and other mouth parts at its tip, its function is to eat, that is self-evident; but to this function is added another of greater importance. The fantastic stylet prepares the way for the eggs; it is the oviduct’s collaborator. And this implement, the emblem of the guild, is so honourable that the father does not hesitate to sport it, though himself incapable of digging the family cells. Like his consort, he too carries an awl, but a smaller one, as befits the modesty of his rôle. A second point becomes clear. In order to insert the egg at convenient points, it is the rule for the insect to possess an implement with two functions, an implement which at the same time opens the passage and guides the eggs along it. This is the case with the Cicada, [22] the Grasshopper, [23] the Saw-fly, the Leucospis [24] and the Ichneumon-fly, [25] all of whom carry a sabre, a saw or a probe at the tip of the abdomen. The Weevil divides the work and apportions it between two implements, one of which, in front, is the perforating auger, and the other, behind, hidden in the body and unsheathed at the moment of the laying, is the guiding tube. Except in the Weevils, this curious mechanism is unknown to me. When the egg is placed in position—and this is quickly done, thanks to the preliminary work of the drill—the mother returns to the point colonized. She packs the disturbed materials a little, she lightly pushes back the uprooted florets; then, without taking further trouble, she goes away. She sometimes even dispenses with these precautions. A few hours later, I examine the heads exploited, which may be recognized by a certain number of faded and slightly projecting patches, each of which shelters an egg. With the point of my penknife I extract the little, faded bundle and open it. At the base, in a small round cell, hollowed out of the substance of the central globule, the receptacle of the thistle-head, is the egg, fairly large, yellow and oval. It is enveloped in a brown substance derived from the tissues injured by the mother’s auger and from the exudations of the wound, which have set like cement. This envelope rises into an irregular cone and ends in the withered florets. In the centre of the tuft we generally see an opening, which might well be a ventilating-shaft. The number of eggs entrusted to a single head may easily be ascertained without destroying the cells: all that we need do is to count the yellow blurs unevenly distributed over the blue background. I have found five, six and more, even in a head smaller than a cherry. Each covers an egg. Do all these eggs come from the same mother? It is possible. At the same time, they may be of diverse origin, for it is not unusual to surprise two mothers both occupied in laying eggs on the same globe. Sometimes the points worked upon almost touch. The mother, it seems, has a very restricted numerical sense and is incapable of keeping count of the occupants. She drives her probe into the florets, unheeding that the place beside her is already taken. As a rule there are too many, far too many feasters at the niggardly banquet of the blue thistle. Three at most will find enough to live on. The first-comers will thrive; the laggards will perish for lack of room at the common table. The grubs are hatched in a week: little white atoms with red heads to them. Suppose them to be three in number, as frequently happens. What have the little creatures in their larder? Next to nothing. The echinops is an exception among the Carduaceæ. Its flowers do not rest upon a fleshy receptacle expanded into a heart, like the artichoke’s. Let us open one of the heads. In the centre, as a common support, is a round firm nucleus, a globe hardly as large as a peppercorn, fixed on the top of a little column which is a continuation of the axis of the stem. That is all. A scanty, a very scanty provision for three consumers. In bulk there is not enough to furnish the first few meals of a single grub; still less is there enough—for it is very tough and unsubstantial—to provide for those fine layers of fat which make the grub look as sleek as butter and are employed as reserves during the transformation. Nevertheless, it is in this paltry globule and the small column which supports it that the three boarders find, their whole life long, the wherewithal to feed and grow. Not a bite is given elsewhere; and even so the attack is delivered with extreme discretion. The food is rasped and nibbled on the surface and not completely consumed. To make much out of nothing, to fill three starveling bellies, sometimes four, with a single crumb, would be out of the question. The secret of the food-supply is not contained in the small amount of solid matter that has disappeared. Let us look into this more closely. I take out a few larvæ which are already fairly well-grown and install dwellings and dwellers in glass tubes. For a long time, with my pocket-lens, I watch the prisoners. I cannot see that they bite into the central knob, which is already damaged, nor the axis, which also has been cut into. From these surfaces, which have been scored since I know not how long; from what appeared to be their daily bread, their mandibles remove not the smallest particle. At most the mouth is applied for a moment to the surface; then it is withdrawn, uneasy and disdainful. It is evident that the ligneous fare, though still quite fresh, does not suit. The proof is completed by the final result of my experiments. In vain I keep the thistle-heads fresh in glass tubes, plugged with a stopper of wet cotton-wool: my attempts at rearing are not once crowned with success. As soon as the head is removed from the plant, its inhabitants begin to die of starvation, whether I intervene or whether I do not. They all pine away in the heart of their native globe and at last perish, no matter in what receptacle—test-tube, flask or tin box—I place my collection. Later, on the other hand, when the feeding-period is over, I shall find it very easy to keep the grubs in good condition and to follow at will their preparations for the nymphosis. This failure tells me that the larva of the Spotted Larinus does not sustain itself with solid food; it prefers the clear broth of the sap. It taps the cask of its azure cellar, that is to say, it makes a careful gash in the axis of the head as well as in the central nucleus. From these surface wounds, which are kept open by fresh strokes of the plane as soon as a dry scab forms upon them, it laps the sap of the thistle, which oozes up from the roots. As long as the blue globe is on its stalk, very much alive, the sap ascends, the broached casks exude their contents and the grub sips the nourishing draught. But, once detached from the stem, cut off from its source of supply, the cellar runs dry. Thereupon the larva promptly dies. This explains the fatal catastrophe of my attempts to rear it. All that the Larinus-larvæ need is to lick the exudations from a wound. The method employed is henceforth obvious. The new-born grubs, hatched upon the central globe, take their places around its axis, proportioning the distance between them to the number of guests. Each of them peels and slashes with its mandibles the part in front of it, causing the nutritious moisture to exude. If the spring dries up through healing, fresh bites revive it. But the attack is made with circumspection, The central column and its circular capital form the mainstay of the globe. If too extensively injured, the scaffolding would bend before the wind and bring down the dwelling. Moreover, the conduits of the aqueduct must be respected, if a suitable supply of sap is to be provided until the end. Accordingly, whether three or four in number, the grubs abstain from rasping the surface too deeply. The cuts, which amount to no more than a judicious paring of the surface, imperil neither the solidity of the structure nor the action of the vessels, so that the blossoms, their plunderers notwithstanding, retain a very healthy appearance. They expand as usual, except that the pretty, blue ground is stained with yellow patches, which grow wider from day to day. At each of these points, a grub is established under the cover of the dead florets. Each blemish marks one diner’s seat at table. The florets, as we said, have for their common support, for their receptacle, the round knob surmounting the axis. It is on this globule that the grubs begin. They attack a few of the florets at their base, uprooting them without injuring them and thrusting them upwards with a heave of the back. The spot thus cleared is slightly broken into and hollowed out and becomes the first refreshment-bar. What becomes of the items removed? Are they thrown to the ground as inconvenient rubbish? The tiny creature is careful not to do anything of the kind, which would mean exposing its plump back, a small but enticing morsel, to the eyes of the foe. Pushed back, the materials cleared away remain intact, still clustered together in their natural position. Not a flake, not a chip falls to earth. By means of a quick-setting, rain-proof glue, the whole of the fragments detached are cemented to the base in a continuous sheaf, so that the blossom is kept intact, save for the yellowish tint of the parts wounded. As the grub increases in size, more florets are cut away and take their place, beside the others, in the roof, which swells by degrees and ends by bulging out. Thus a quiet dwelling is obtained, sheltered from wind and weather and the heat of the sun. Within, the hermit sips at his cask in safety; he waxes big and fat. I suspected it, that the larva would be able to make up by its own industry for the rough-and-ready installation of the egg! Where maternal care is lacking, the grub possesses special talents as a safeguard. Nevertheless, nothing in the grub of the Spotted Larinus reveals the skilful builder of thatched huts. It is a little sausage of a creature, a rusty yellow in colour and bent into a hook. There is not a vestige of legs; the whole equipment consists of the mouth and the opposite end, an active auxiliary. What can this little roll of rancid butter be capable of doing? To observe it at work is easy enough at the propitious moment. In the middle of August, when the larva, having achieved its full growth, is busy strengthening and plastering its abode in view of the approaching nymphosis, I half-open a few cells. The hulls opened, but still adhering to the natal blossom, are arranged in a row in a glass tube which will enable me to watch the work without disturbing the worker. I have not long to wait for the result. In a state of repose, the grub is a hook with the extremities very near together. From time to time I see it bring the two ends into intimate contact and close the circuit. Then—do not let us be shocked by the grub’s procedure: this would mean misconceiving life’s sacred simplicities—then with its mandibles it very neatly gathers from the stercoral orifice a tiny drop the size of an ordinary pin’s head. It is a muddy white liquid, flowing like gum, similar in appearance to the resinous beads that ooze from the horned galls of the turpentine-tree when you break them. The grub spreads its little drop over the edges of the breach made in its dwelling; it distributes it here and there, very sparingly; it pushes and coaxes it into the gaps. Then, attacking the adjacent florets, it picks out the shreds and chips and bits of hairs. This does not satisfy it. It rasps the axis and the central nucleus of the blossom, detaching tiny scraps and atoms. A laborious task, for the mandibles are short and cut badly. They tear rather than slice. All this is distributed over the still fresh cement. This done, the grub bestirs itself most strenuously, bending into a hook and straightening out again; it rolls and glides about its cabin to make the materials amalgamate and to smooth the wall with the pad of its round rump. When this pressing and polishing is finished, the larva once more curves into a circle. A second white drop appears at the factory-door. The mandibles take hold of the ignominious product as they would of an ordinary mouthful; and the process is repeated as before: the cell is first smeared with glue and then encrusted with ligneous particles. After thus expending a certain number of trowelfuls of cement, the grub remains motionless; it seems to be abandoning a job too much for its means. Twenty-four hours later, the open hulls are still gaping. An attempt has been made to repair the cell, but not to close it thoroughly. The task is too heavy. What is lacking? Not the ligneous materials, which can always be obtained from the grub’s surroundings, but the adhesive cement, the factory having closed down. And why has it closed down? The answer is quite simple: because the vessels of the thistle-head detached from its stalk are dry and can no longer furnish the food upon which everything depends. The curly-bearded Chaldean used to build with bricks of mud baked in the kiln and cemented with bitumen. The Weevil of the blue thistle possessed the secret of asphalt long before man did. Better still: to put its method into practice with a rapidity and economy unknown to the Babylonian contractors, it had and still has its own well of bitumen. What can this viscous substance be? As I have explained, it appears in opal drops at the waste-pipe of the intestine. Becoming hard and resinous on contact with the air, it turns a tawny red, so much so that the inside of the cell looks at first as though coated with quince-jelly. The final hue is a dull brown, against which pale specks of mixed ligneous refuse stand out sharply. The first idea that occurs to one’s mind is that the Weevil’s glue must be some special secretion, not unlike silk, but emerging from the opposite pole. Can there be actually glands secreting a viscous fluid in the grub’s hinder part? I open a larva which is busily building. Things are not as I imagined: there is no glandular apparatus attached to the lower end of the digestive canal. Nor is there anything to be seen in the ventricle. Only the Malpighian tubes, which are rather large and four in number, reveal, by their opaline tint, the fact that they are fairly full; while the lower portion of the intestine is dilated with a pulpy substance which conspicuously attracts the eye. It is a semi-fluid, viscous, treacly material of a muddy white. I perceive that it contains an abundance of opaque corpuscles, like finely powdered chalk, which effervesce when dissolved in nitric acid and are therefore uric products. This very soft pulp is, beyond a doubt, the cement which the grub ejects and collects drop by drop; and the rectum is obviously the bitumen-warehouse. The parity of aspect, colour, and treacly consistency are to me decisive: the grub consolidates and cements and creates a work of art with the refuse from its sewer. Is this really an excremental residue? Doubts may be permitted. The four Malpighian tubes which have poured the powdered urates into the intestine might well supply it with other materials. They do not in general seem to perform very exclusive duties. Why should they not be entrusted with various functions in a poorly-equipped organism? They fill with a chalky broth to enable the Capricorn’s larva to block the doorway of its cell with a marble slab. It would not be at all surprising if they were also gorged with the viscous fluid that becomes the asphalt of the Larinus. In this embarrassing instance the following explanation may possibly suffice. The Larinus’ larva observes, as we know, a very light diet, consisting of sap instead of solid food. Therefore there is no coarse residue. I have never seen any dirt in the cell; its cleanliness is perfect. This does not mean that all the nourishment is absorbed. There is certainly refuse of no nutritive value, but it is thin and almost fluid. Can this be the pitch that cements and stops up the chinks? Why not? If so, the grub would be building with its excrement; with its ordure it would be making a pretty home. Here we must silence our repugnance. Where would you have the recluse obtain the material for its casket? Its cell is its world. It knows nothing beyond that cell; nothing comes to its assistance. It must perish if it cannot find its store of cement within itself. Various caterpillars, not rich enough to afford the luxury of a perfect cocoon, have the knack of felting their hairs with a little silk. The Larinus grub, that poverty-stricken creature, having no spinning-mill, must have recourse to its intestine, its only stand-by. This stercoral method proves once more that necessity is the mother of invention. To build a luxurious palace with one’s ordure is a most meritorious device. Only an insect would be
{'title': 'The Life of the Weevil by Jean-Henri Fabre and Alexander Teixeira de Mattos', 'source': 'Project Gutenberg', 'lang': 'en'}