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.