Processionaries, which are not rare; as it happens, a single string
of them, five or six yards long, has just climbed down from my
umbrella-pines and is at this moment unfolding itself in the walks
of my garden, carpeting the ground traversed with transparent
silk, according to the custom of the race. To say nothing of the
meteorological apparatus of unparalleled delicacy which they carry
on their backs, these caterpillars, as everybody knows, have this
remarkable quality, that they travel only in a troop, one after the
other, like Breughel’s blind men or those of the parable, each of them
obstinately, indissolubly following its leader; so much so that, our
author having one morning disposed the file on the edge of a large
stone vase, thus closing the circuit, for seven whole days, during
an atrocious week, amid cold, hunger and unspeakable weariness, the
unhappy troop on its tragic round, without rest, respite or mercy,
pursued the pitiless circle until death overtook it.
5
But I see that our heroes are infinitely too numerous and that we
must not linger over our descriptions. We may at most, in enumerating
the more important and familiar, bestow on each of them a hurried
epithet, in the manner of old Homer. Shall I mention, for instance, the
Leucospis, a parasite of the Mason-bee, who, to slay his brothers and
sisters in their cradle, arms himself with a horn helmet and a barbed
breastplate, which he doffs immediately after the extermination, the
safeguard of a hideous right of primogeniture? Shall I tell of the
marvellous anatomical knowledge of the Tachytes, of the Cerceris, of
the Ammophila, of the Languedocian Sphex and many other wasps, who,
according as they wish to paralyse or to kill their prey or their
adversary, know exactly, without ever blundering, which nerve-centres
to strike with their sting or their mandibles? Shall I speak of the art
of the Eumenes, who transforms her stronghold into a complete museum
adorned with shells and with grains of translucent quartz; of the
magnificent metamorphosis of the Grey Locust; of the musical instrument
owned by the Cricket, whose bow numbers one hundred and fifty
triangular prisms that set in motion simultaneously the four dulcimers
of the wing-case? Shall I sing the fairy-like birth of the nymph of the
Onthophagus, a transparent monster, with a bull’s snout, that seems
carved out of a block of crystal? Would you behold the Flesh-fly, the
common Blue-bottle, daughter of the maggot, as she issues from the
earth? Listen to our author:
“She disjoints her head into two movable halves, which, each
distended with its great red eye, by turns separate and reunite. In
the intervening space, a large, glassy hernia rises and disappears,
disappears and rises. When the two halves move asunder, with one
eye forced back to the right and the other to the left, it is as
though the insect were splitting its brain-pan in order to expel the
contents. Then the hernia rises, blunt at the end and swollen into
a great knob. Next, the forehead closes and the hernia retreats,
leaving visible only a kind of shapeless muzzle. In short, a frontal
pouch, with deep pulsations, momentarily renewed, becomes the
instrument of deliverance, the pestle wherewith the newly-hatched
Dipteron bruises the sand and causes it to crumble. Gradually, the
legs push the rubbish back and the insect advances so much towards
the surface.”
6
And monster after monster passes, such as the imagination of Bosch or
Callot never conceived! The larva of the Rosechafer, which, though it
has legs under its belly, always travels on its back; the Blue-winged
Locust, unluckier still than the Flesh-fly and possessing nothing
wherewith to perforate the soil, to escape from the tomb and reach
the light but a cervical bladder, a viscous blister; and the Empusa,
who, with her curved abdomen, her great projecting eyes, her legs with
knee-pieces armed with cleavers, her halberd, her abnormally tall
mitre, would certainly be the most devilish goblin that ever walked the
earth, if, beside her, the Praying Mantis were not so frightful that
her mere aspect deprives her victims of their power of movement when
she assumes, in front of them, what the entomologists have termed “the
spectral attitude.”
7
One cannot mention, even casually, the numberless industries, nearly
all of absorbing interest, exercised among the rocks, under the ground,
in the walls, on the branches, the grass, the flowers, the fruits and
down to the very bodies of the subjects studied; for we sometimes find
a treble superposition of parasites, as in the Oil-beetles; and we see
the maggot itself, the sinister guest at the last feast of all, feed
some thirty brigands with its substance.
Among the Hymenoptera, which represent the most intellectual class in
the world which we are studying, the building-talents of our wonderful
Hive-bee are certainly equalled, in other orders of architecture,
by those of more than one wild and solitary bee and notably by the
Megachile, or Leaf-cutter, a little insect which is nothing to look
at and which, to house its eggs, manufactures honey-pots formed of a
multitude of disks and ellipses cut with mathematical precision from
the leaves of certain trees. For lack of space, I am unable, to my
great regret, to quote the beautiful and pellucid pages which Fabre,
with his usual conscientiousness, devotes to the exhaustive study of
this admirable work; nevertheless, since the occasion offers, let us
listen to his own words, though it be but for a moment and in regard to
a single detail:
“With the oval pieces, it becomes another matter. What model has the
Megachile when cutting her neat ellipses out of the delicate material
for her wallets, the robinia-leaves? What ideal pattern guides her
scissors? What system of measurement tells her the dimension? One
would like to picture the insect as a living pair of compasses,
capable of tracing an elliptic curve by a certain natural inflexion
of its body, even as our arm traces a circle by swinging from the
shoulder. A blind mechanism, the mere outcome of its organization,
would alone be responsible for its geometry. This explanation would
tempt me if the large oval pieces were not accompanied by much
smaller ones, also oval, which are used to fill the empty spaces. A
pair of compasses which changes its radius of its own accord and
alters the curve according to the plan before it appears to me an
instrument somewhat difficult to believe in. There must be something
better than that. The circular pieces of the lid suggest it to us.
“If, by the mere flexion inherent in her structure, the Leaf-cutter
succeeds in cutting out ovals, how does she manage to cut out rounds?
Can we admit the presence of other wheels in the machinery for the
new pattern, so different in shape and size? However, the real point
of the difficulty does not lie there. Those rounds, for the most
part, fit the mouth of the jar with almost exact precision. When the
cell is finished, the bee flies hundreds of yards away to make the
lid. She arrives at the leaf from which the disk is to be cut. What
picture, what recollection has she of the pot to be covered? Why,
none at all: she has never seen it; she does her work underground, in
utter darkness! At the utmost, she can have the indications of touch:
not actual indications, of course, for the pot is not there, but
past indications, useless in a work of precision. And yet the disk to
be cut out must have a fixed diameter: if it were too large, it would
not go in; if too small, it would close badly, it would slip down on
the honey and suffocate the egg. How shall it be given its correct
dimensions without a pattern? The bee does not hesitate for a moment.
She cuts out her disk with the same celerity which she would display
in detaching any shapeless lobe that might do for a stopper; and
that disk, without further measurement, is of the right size to fit
the pot. Let whoso will explain this geometry, which in my opinion
is inexplicable, even when we allow for memory begotten of touch and
sight.”
Let us add that the author calculated that, to form the cells of a
kindred Megachile, the Silky Megachile, exactly 1,064 of these ellipses
and disks would be required; and they must all be collected and shaped
in the course of an existence that lasts a few weeks.
8
Who would imagine that the Pentatoma, on the other hand, the poor and
evil-smelling Wood-bug, has invented a really extraordinary apparatus
wherewith to leave the egg? And first let us state that this egg is
a marvellous little box of snowy whiteness, which our author thus
describes:
“The microscope discovers a surface engraved with dents similar to
those of a thimble and arranged with exquisite symmetry. At the
top and bottom of the cylinder is a wide belt of a dead black; on
the sides, a large white zone with four big, black spots evenly
distributed. The lid, surrounded by snowy cilia and encircled with
white at the edge, swells into a black cap with a white knot in the
centre. Altogether, a striking burial urn, with the sudden contrast
between the coal-black and the fleecy white. The Etruscans would have
found a magnificent model here for their funeral pottery.”
The little bug, whose forehead is too soft, covers her head, to raise
the lid of the box, with a mitre formed of three triangular rods, which
is always at the bottom of the egg at the moment of delivery. Her limbs
being sheathed like those of a mummy, she has nothing wherewith to put
her rods in motion except the pulsations produced by the rhythmic flow
of blood in her skull and acting after the manner of a piston. The
rivets of the lid gradually give way; and, as soon as the insect is
free, it lays aside its mechanical helmet.
Another species of bug, _Reduvius personatus_, who lives mostly in
lumber-rooms, where she lies hidden in the dust, has invented a still
more astonishing system of hatching. Here, the lid of the egg is not
riveted, as in the case of the Pentatomae, but simply glued. At the
moment of liberation, the lid rises and we see:
“... a spherical vesicle emerge from the shell and gradually expand,
like a soap-bubble blown through a straw. Driven farther and farther
back by the extension of this bladder, the lid falls.
“Then the bomb bursts; in other words, the blister, swollen beyond
its capacity of resistance, rips at the top. This envelope, which is
an extremely tenuous membrane, generally remains clinging to the edge
of the orifice, where it forms a high, white rim. At other times,
the explosion loosens it and flings it outside the shell. In those
conditions, it is a dainty cup, half spherical, with torn edges,
lengthened out below into a delicate, winding stalk.”
Now, how is this miraculous explosion produced? Fabre assumes that:
“Very slowly, as the tiny creature takes shape and grows, this
bladder-shaped reservoir receives the products of the work of
respiration performed under the cover of the outer membrane. Instead
of being expelled through the egg-shell, the carbonic acid, the
incessant result of the vital oxidization, is accumulated in this
sort of gasometer, inflates and distends it and presses upon the lid.
When the insect is ripe for hatching, a superadded activity in the
respiration completes the inflation, which perhaps has been preparing
since the first evolution of the germ. At last, yielding to the
increasing pressure of the gaseous bladder, the lid becomes unsealed.
The chick in its shell has its air-chamber; the young Reduvius has
its bomb of carbonic acid: it frees itself in the act of breathing.”
9
One would never weary of dipping eagerly into these inexhaustible
treasures. We imagine, for instance, that, from seeing cobwebs so
frequently displayed in all manner of places, we possess adequate
notions of the genius and methods of our familiar spiders. Far from
it: the realities of scientific observation call for an entire volume
crammed with revelations of which we had no conception. I will simply
name, at random, the symmetrical arches of the Clotho Spider’s nest,
the astonishing funicular flight of the young of our Garden Spider, the
diving-bell of the Water Spider, the live telephone-wire which connects
the web with the leg of the Cross Spider hidden in her parlour and
informs her whether the vibration of her toils is due to the capture of
a prey or a caprice of the wind.
It is impossible, therefore, short of having unlimited space at one’s
disposal, to do more than touch, as it were with the tip of the
phrases, upon the miracles of maternal instinct, which, moreover, are
confounded with those of the higher manufactures and form the bright
centre of the insect’s psychology. One would, in the same way, require
several chapters to convey a summary idea of the nuptial rites which
constitute the quaintest and most fabulous episodes of these new
Arabian Nights.
The male of the Spanish Fly, for instance, begins by frenziedly
beating his spouse with his abdomen and his feet, after which, with
his arms crossed and quivering, he remains long in ecstasy. The
newly-wedded Osmiae clap their mandibles terribly, as though it were a
matter rather of devouring each other; on the other hand, the largest
of our moths, the Great Peacock, who is the size of a bat, when drunk
with love finds his mouth so completely atrophied that it becomes no
more than a vague shadow. But nothing equals the marriage of the Green
Grasshopper, of which I cannot speak here, for it is doubtful whether
even Latin possesses the words needed to describe it seemingly.
All said, the marriage-customs are dreadful and, contrary to that
which happens in every other world, here it is the female of the pair
that stands for strength and intelligence and also for the cruelty
and tyranny which appear to be their inevitable outcome. Almost every
wedding ends in the violent and immediate death of the husband. Often,
the bride begins by eating a certain number of suitors. The prototype
of these fantastic unions could be supplied by the Languedocian
Scorpions, who, as we know, carry lobster-claws and a long tail
supplied with a sting, the prick of which is extremely dangerous. They
have a prelude to the festival in the shape of a sentimental stroll,
claw in claw; then, motionless, with fingers still gripped, they
contemplate each other blissfully, interminably; day and night pass
over their ecstasy, while they remain face to face, petrified with
admiration. Next, the foreheads come together and touch; the mouths--if
we can give the name of mouth to the monstrous orifice that opens
between the claws--are joined in a sort of kiss; after which the union
is accomplished, the male is transfixed with a mortal sting and the
terrible spouse crunches and gobbles him up with gusto.
But the Mantis, the ecstatic insect with the arms always raised in an
attitude of supreme invocation, the horrible _Mantis religiosa_ or
Praying Mantis, does better still: she eats her husbands (for the
insatiable creature sometimes consumes seven or eight in succession)
while they strain her passionately to their heart. Her inconceivable
kisses devour, not in a metaphorical, but in an appallingly real
fashion, the ill-fated choice of her soul stomach. She begins with
the head, goes down to the thorax, nor stops till she comes to the
hind-legs, which she deems too tough. She then pushes away the
unfortunate remains, while a new lover, who was quietly awaiting the
end of the monstrous banquet, heroically steps forward to undergo the
same fate.
10
Henri Fabre is indeed the revealer of this new world, for, strange
as the admission may seem at a time when we think that we know all
that surrounds us, most of those insects minutely described in the
vocabularies, learnedly classified and barbarously christened, had
hardly ever been observed in real life or thoroughly investigated in
all the phases of their brief and evasive appearances. He has devoted
to surprising their little secrets, which are the reverse of our
greatest mysteries, fifty years of a solitary existence, misunderstood,
poor, often very near to penury, but lit up every day by the joy
which a truth brings, which is the greatest of all human joys. Petty
truths, I shall be told, those presented by the habits of a spider or a
grasshopper. There are no petty truths to-day; there is but one truth,
whose looking-glass, to our uncertain eyes, seems broken, though its
every fragment, whether reflecting the evolution of a planet or the
flight of a bee, contains the supreme law.
And these truths thus discovered had the good fortune to be grasped
by a mind which knew how to understand what they themselves can but
ambiguously express, to interpret what they are obliged to conceal and,
at the same time, to appreciate the shimmering beauty, almost invisible
to the majority of mankind, that shines for a moment around all that
exists, especially around that which still remains very close to nature
and has hardly left its primeval sanctuary.
To make of these long annals the generous and delightful work of
literature that they are and not the monotonous and arid record of
finical descriptions and trivial acts that they might have been,
various and so to speak conflicting gifts were needed. To the patience,
the precision, the scientific minuteness, the protean and practical
ingenuity, the energy of a Darwin in the face of the unknown, to the
faculty of expressing what has to be expressed with order, clearness
and certainty, the venerable anchorite of Sérignan adds many of those
qualities which are not to be acquired, certain of those innate good
poetic virtues which cause his sure and supple prose, though a trifle
provincial, a trifle antiquated, a trifle primitive, to take its place
among the excellent prose of the day, prose of the kind that has its
own atmosphere, in which we breathe gratefully and tranquilly and
which we find only in masterpieces.
Lastly, there was needed--and this was not the least requirement of
the work--a mind ever ready to cope with the riddles which, among
those little objects, rise up at every step as enormous as those which
fill the skies and perhaps more numerous, more imperious and more
strange, as though nature had here given a freer scope to her last
wishes and an easier outlet to her secret thoughts. Fabre shrinks from
none of those boundless problems which are persistently put to us by
all the inhabitants of that tiny world where mysteries are heaped up
in a denser and more bewildering fashion than in any other. He thus
meets and faces, turn by turn, the redoubtable questions of instinct
and intelligence, of the origin of species, of the harmony or the
accidents of the universe, of the life lavished upon the abysses of
death, without counting the no less vast, but so to speak more human
problems which, among infinite others, are inscribed within the
range, if not within the grasp, of our intelligence: parthenogenesis;
the prodigious geometry of the wasps and bees; the logarithmic spiral
of the snail; the antennary sense; the miraculous force which, in
absolute isolation, without the possible introduction of anything from
the outside, increases the volume of the Minotaurus’ egg tenfold,
where it lies, and, during seven to nine months, nourishes with an
invisible and spiritual food, not the lethargy, but the active life of
the scorpion and of the young of the Lycosa and the Clotho Spider. He
does not attempt to explain them by one of those generally-acceptable
theories, such as that of evolution, which merely shifts the ground
of the difficulty and which, I may say in passing, emerges from these
volumes in a somewhat sorry plight, after being sharply confronted with
incontestable facts.
11
Waiting for chance or a god to enlighten us, he is able, in the
presence of the unknown, to preserve that great religious and
attentive silence which is dominant in the best minds of the day. There
are those who say:
“Now that you have reaped a plentiful harvest of details, you should
follow up analysis with synthesis and generalize the origin of instinct
in an all-embracing view.”
To these he replies, with the humble and magnificent loyalty that
illumines all his work:
“Because I have stirred a few grains of sand on the shore, am I in a
position to know the depths of the ocean?
“Life has unfathomable secrets. Human knowledge will be erased from
the archives of the world before we possess the last word that a Gnat
has to say to us....
“Success is for the loud talkers, the self-convinced dogmatists;
everything is admitted on condition that it be noisily proclaimed.
Let us throw off this sham and recognize that, in reality, we
know nothing about anything, if things were probed to the bottom.
Scientifically, Nature is a riddle without a definite solution to
satisfy man’s curiosity. Hypothesis follows on hypothesis; the
theoretical rubbish-heap accumulates; and truth ever eludes us. To
know how not to know might well be the last word of wisdom.”
Evidently, this is hoping too little. In the frightful pit, in the
bottomless funnel wherein whirl all those contradictory facts which
are resolved in obscurity, we know just as much as our cave-dwelling
ancestors; but at least we know that we do not know. We survey the
dark faces of all the riddles, we try to estimate their number, to
classify their varying degrees of dimness, to obtain an idea of their
position and their extent. That already is something, pending the
day of the first gleams of light. In any case, it means doing in the
presence of the mysteries all that the most upright intelligence can do
to-day; and that is what the author of this incomparable Iliad does,
with more confidence than he professes. He gazes at them attentively.
He wears out his life in surprising their most minute secrets. He
prepares for them, in his thoughts and in ours, the field necessary for
their evolutions. He increases the consciousness of his ignorance in
proportion to their importance and learns to understand more and more
that they are incomprehensible.
EVIL-SPEAKING
IX
EVIL-SPEAKING
1
“See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” say the three sacred
monkeys carved over the gate of the Buddhist temple of Iyeyasu at Nikko.
We all of us speak ill of one another:
“No one,” Pascal remarks, “speaks of us in our presence as he does in
our absence. The union that exists among men is based solely on this
mutual deceit; and few friendships would survive if each knew what
his friend says when he is not there, though he be speaking of him in
all sincerity and without passion.
“I lay it down as a fact that, if all men knew what they say of one
another, there would not be four friends in this world.”
If you do away with evil-speaking, you do away with three-fourths of
our conversation; and an unbearable silence will hover over every
gathering. Evil-speaking or calumny--for it is extremely difficult to
separate the two sisters; and in reality any evil-speaking is likely to
be calumnious, inasmuch as we know others even less well than we know
ourselves--evil-speaking, which feeds all that creates disunion between
men and poisons their intercourse, is nevertheless the chief motive
that brings them together and enables them to enjoy the pleasures of
society.
But the ravages which it wreaks all around us are too well-known and
have too often been described to make it necessary for us to portray
them once again. Let us here consider only the harm which it does to
him who indulges in it. It accustoms him to see only the petty sides
of men and things; little by little it conceals from him the bold
outlines, the great unities, the heights and depths containing the only
truths that count and endure.
In reality, the evil which we find in others, the evil which we speak
of them, exists within ourselves: from ourselves we derive it; upon
ourselves it recoils. We perceive clearly only those defects which are
ours, or which we are on the point of acquiring. Within ourselves is
kindled the evil flame whose reflection we perceive on others. Each of
us diligently searches out, among those who surround him, the vice or
the defect that reveals to the clear-sighted the vice or the defect
to which he himself is thrall. There is no more ingenuous or intimate
confession, even as there is no better examination of conscience, than
to ask one’s self:
“What is the fault which I most willingly impute to my neighbour?”