THE BIG EATERS
“INSECTS propagate themselves by eggs, which they lay, with admirable
foresight, where the young will be sure to find nourishment. The little
creature that comes from the egg is a larva, a feeble grub, which, most
often, has to shift for itself, procure at its own risk food and
shelter—the most difficult thing in this world. In these painful
beginnings it cannot expect any help from its mother, dead some time
before; for in insect life the parents generally die before the hatching
of the eggs that produce the young. Without delay the little larva sets
to work. It eats. It is its sole business, and a serious one, on which
its future depends. It eats, not only to keep up its strength from day
to day, but above all to acquire the plumpness necessary for its future
metamorphosis. I must tell you—and this perhaps will surprise you—that
an insect ceases to grow after attaining its final perfect form. It is
known, too, that there are insects—among others, the butterfly of the
silkworm—that do not take any nourishment at all.
“A cat is at first a tiny little pink-nosed creature, so small that it
could rest in the hollow of the hand. In one or two months it is a
pretty kitten that amuses itself at a mere nothing, and with its nimble
paw whips the wisp of paper that one throws before it. Another year, and
it is a tom-cat that patiently watches for mice or joins battle with its
rivals on the roof. But, whether a tiny creature hardly able to open its
little blue eyes, or a pretty playful kitten, or a big quarrelsome
tom-cat, it has always the form of a cat.
“It is otherwise with insects. The swallow-tail, under its form of
butterfly, is not first small, then medium, then large. When, for the
first time, it opens its wings and takes flight, it is as large as it
ever will be. When it comes out from under ground, where it lived as a
grub, when for the first time it appears in the daylight, the June bug
is such as you know it. There are little cats, but no little
swallow-tails nor little June bugs. After the metamorphosis, an insect
is what it will be to the end.”
“But I have seen small June bugs flying round the willows in the
evening,” objected Jules.
“Those little June bugs are of a different kind. They will always remain
the same. Never will they grow and become common June bugs, any more
than a cat would grow into a tiger, which it resembles so much.
“The grub alone grows. At first very small on coming out of the egg,
little by little it acquires a size in conformity with the future
insect. It gathers the materials that the metamorphosis will
use,—materials for the wings, antennæ, legs, and all those things that
the larva does not have, but that the insect must have. Out of what will
the big green worm that lives in dead wood, and must some day become a
stag-beetle, make the enormous branched mandibles and the robust horny
covering of the perfect insect? Of what will the larva make the long
antennæ of the capricorn? Of what will the caterpillar make the large
wings of the swallow-tail? Of that which the caterpillar, larva, and
worm amass now, with thrifty hoarding of life-supporting matter.
“If the little pink-nosed cat were born without ears, paws, tail, fur,
mustaches, if it were simply a little ball of flesh, and should some day
have to acquire all at once, while asleep, ears, paws, tail, fur,
mustaches, and many other things, is it not true that this work of life
would necessitate materials gathered together beforehand and held in
reserve in the fatty tissues of the animal? No thing can be made from
nothing; the smallest hair of the cat’s mustache shoots forth at the
expense of the substance of the animal, substance which it acquires by
eating.
[Illustration: Goat Moth]
“The larva is in precisely this case: it has nothing, or next to
nothing, that the perfect insects must have. It must therefore amass, in
view of future changes, materials for the change; it must eat for two:
for itself first, and then for the insect that will come from its
substance, transformed and, in a sense, recast. So the larvæ are endowed
with an incomparable appetite. As I have said, to eat is their sole
business. They eat night and day, often without stopping, without taking
breath. To lose a mouthful, what imprudence! The future butterfly would
perhaps have one scale less to its wings. So they eat gluttonously, take
on a stomach, become big, fat, plump. It is the duty of larvæ.
“Some attack plants; they browse on the leaves, chew the flowers, bite
the flesh of fruit. Others have a stomach strong enough to digest wood;
they hollow out galleries in the tree-trunks, file off, grate, pulverize
the hardest oak, as well as the tender willow. Others, again, prefer
decomposed animal matter; they haunt infected corpses, fill their
stomachs with rottenness. Still others seek excrement and feast on
filth. They are all scavengers on whom has developed the high mission of
cleansing the earth of its pollution. You would sicken at the mere
thought of these worms that swarm in pus; yet one of the most important
services, a providential service, is rendered by these disgusting eaters
which clear away infection and give back its constituent elements to
life. As if to make amends for its filthy needs, one of these larvæ will
later be a magnificent fly, rivaling polished bronze in its brilliancy;
another, a beetle perfumed with musk, its rich coat vying with gold and
precious stones in splendor.
[Illustration: Phylloxera]
“But these larvæ devoted to the work of general sanitation cannot make
us forget other eaters, of whom we are victims. The grubs of the June
bug alone sometimes multiply so rapidly in the ground that immense
tracts are denuded of vegetation, which is gnawed at the roots. The
forester’s shrubs, the farmer’s harvests, the gardener’s plants, just
when everything seems prosperous, some fine morning, hang withered,
smitten to death. The worm has passed that way, and all is lost. Fire
could not have committed more frightful ravages. A miserable yellow
louse, hardly visible, lives under ground, where it attacks the roots of
the grape vine. It is called _phylloxera_. Its calamitous breed
threatens to destroy all our vineyards. Some grubs, small enough to
lodge in a grain of wheat, ravage the wheat in our granaries and leave
only the bran. Others browse the lucerne so that the mower finds nothing
left. Others, for years, gnaw at the heart of the wood of the oak,
poplar, pine, and divers, other large trees. Others, which turn into
those little white butterflies flying around the lamp in the evening and
called moths, eat our cloth stuffs bit by bit, and finish by reducing
them to rags. Others attack wainscoting, old furniture, and reduce them
to powder. Others—But I should never get through if I were to tell you
all. This little people to which we often disdain to pay the slightest
attention, this little race of insects, is so powerful on account of the
robust appetite of its larvæ, that man ought seriously to reckon with
it. If a certain grub succeeds in multiplying beyond measure, whole
provinces are threatened with the tragic fate of starvation. And we are
left in perfect ignorance on the subject of these devourers! How can you
defend yourself if the enemy is unknown to you? Ah, if I only had the
management of these things! As for you, my dear children, while waiting
for our talks to be resumed with more detail concerning these ravagers,
remember this: the larvæ of insects are the great eaters of this world,
the providential demolishers that finish the work of death and thus
prepare for the work of life, since everything, or nearly everything
passes through their stomach.”
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