The Faber Book of Science (29 page)

On this page are fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Back-bones, fins, vertebral links, bones of the head, crystal of the eye turned to a black globule, everything 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 an inclination to scratch off a bit with our finger and taste this supramillenary 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 says to us:

‘These fishes lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly, swells came and asphyxiated them in their mud-thickened waves. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, they have passed through time, will pass through it indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.’

The same swells brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host
of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so much so that the lacustrian deposit talks to us 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 our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves drawn in brown prints. The stone herbal vies in botanical accuracy with a normal herbal. It repeats what the shells had already told us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in former days; it no longer includes palm-trees, camphor-yielding laurels, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions.

Continue to turn the pages. We now come to the insects. The most frequent are the Diptera, of middling size, often very humble flies and gnats. The teeth of the great Squali astonished us by their soft polish amid the roughness of their chalky veinstone. What shall we say of these frail midges preserved intact in their marly shrine? The frail creature, which our fingers could not grasp without crushing it, lies undeformed beneath the weight of the mountains!

The six slender legs, which the least thing is enough to disjoint, here 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 of the extremities. Here are the two wings, unfurled. The fine net-work of their nervures can be studied under the lens as clearly as in the Dipteron of the collections, stuck upon its pin. The antennary tufts have lost none of their subtle elegance; the belly gives us the number of the rings, edged with a row of atoms that were cilia.

The carcase of a mastodont, defying time in its sandy bed, already astonishes us: a gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.

Certainly, the Mosquito, carried by the rising swells, did not come from far away. Before his arrival, the hurly-burly of a thread of water must have reduced him to that annihilation to which he was so near. He lived on the shores of the lake. Killed by the joys of a morning – the old age of gnats – he fell from the top of his reed, was forthwith drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.

Who are those others, those dumpy ones, with hard, convex elytra, the most numerous next to the Diptera? Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us plainly. They are proboscidian Coleoptera, Rhynchopora, or, in less hard terms, Weevils. There are small ones,
middling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.

Their attitudes on the chalky slab are not as correct as those of the Mosquito. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum is at one time hidden under the chest, at another projects forward. Some show it in profile; others – more frequent these – stretch it to one side, as the result of a twist in the neck.

These dislocated, contorted insects did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Dipteron. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants on the banks, the others, the majority, come from the surrounding neighbourhood, brought by the rains, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as branches and stones. A stout armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way to some extent; and the miry
winding-sheet
received the drowned Beetles as the disorder of the passage left them.

These strangers, come perhaps from afar, supply us with precious information. They tell us that, whereas the banks of the lake had the Mosquito as the chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil.

Outside the snout-carrying family, the sheets of my Apt rock show me hardly anything more, especially in the order of the Coleoptera. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, the Dung-beetle, the Capricorn, which the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvests, 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, the Gyrinus, the Dytiscus, all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had a great chance of coming down to us mummified between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they lived in the lake, whose muds would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more perfectly than the little fishes and especially than the Dipteron. Well, of those aquatic Coleoptera there is no trace either.

Where were they, where were those missing from the geological reliquary? Where were they of the thickets, of the green-sward, of the worm-eaten 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, therefore, if I may
credit the modest records which I am free to consult, is the oldest of the Coleoptera.

Life, at the start, fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the Saurian, it revelled at first in monsters fifteen and twenty yards long. It placed horns on their noses and eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, hollowed their necks into spiny wallets, wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though not with 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 pointed teeth of the reptile and appended a long, feathered tail unto its rump. These undetermined and revoltingly ugly 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 brute of antiquity is, first and foremost, an atrocious machine for snapping, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later.

The Weevil, in his fashion, to a certain extent, repeats these aberrations. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut foursquare; elsewhere a crazy reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouthpiece, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on the sides, the antennæ, with their first joints set in a groove.

What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose? Where did the insect find the model? Nowhere. The Weevil is its inventor and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Coleopteron indulges in these buccal 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 make small account of these microcephali, in respect of intelligence; we class them among the obtuse, among creatures bereft of working capacity. These surmises will not be very largely upset.

Though the Curculio be but little glorified by his talents, this is no reason for scorning 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 the workers in incubation within the limits of possibility. He speaks to us of primitive forms, sometimes so quaint; he is, in his own little world, what the bird with the toothed jaws and the Saurian with the horned eyebrows are in a higher world.

In ever-thriving legions, he has been handed down to us without changing his characteristics. He is to-day as he was in the old times of the continents: the prints in the chalky slates proclaim the fact aloud. Under any such print, 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 Curculionid, therefore, we shall obtain a very approximate chapter upon the biology of his predecessors, at the time when Provence had great lakes filled with crocodiles and palm-trees on their banks wherewith to shade them. The history of the present will teach us the history of the past.

If skies remain clear, the air warm, and pollen and nectar abound in the flowers, the workers, through a kind of forgetful indulgence, or over-scrupulous prudence perhaps, will for a short time longer endure the importunate, disastrous presence of the males. These comport themselves in the hive as did Penelope’s suitors in the house of Ulysses. Indelicate and wasteful, sleek and corpulent, fully content with their idle existence as honorary lovers, they feast and carouse, throng the alleys, obstruct the passages, and hinder the work; jostling and jostled, fatuously pompous, swelled with foolish, good-natured contempt; harbouring never a suspicion of the deep and calculating scorn wherewith the workers regard them, of the constantly growing hatred to which they give rise, or of the destiny that awaits them. For their pleasant slumbers they select the snuggest corners of the hive; then, rising carelessly, they flock to the open cells where the honey smells sweetest, and soil with their excrements the combs they frequent. The patient workers, their eyes steadily fixed on the future, will silently set things right. From noon till three, when the purple country trembles in blissful lassitude beneath the invincible gaze of a July or August sun, the drones will appear on the threshold. They have a helmet made of enormous black pearls, two lofty, quivering plumes, a doublet of iridescent, yellowish velvet, an heroic tuft, and a four-fold mantle, translucent and rigid. They create a prodigious stir, brush the sentry aside, overturn the cleaners, and collide with the foragers as these
return, laden with their humble spoil. They have the busy air, the extravagant, contemptuous gait of indispensable gods who should be simultaneously venturing towards some destiny unknown to the vulgar. One by one they sail off into space, irresistible, glorious, and tranquilly make for the nearest flowers, where they sleep till the afternoon freshness awake them. Then, with the same majestic pomp, and still overflowing with magnificent schemes, they return to the hive, go straight to the cells, plunge their head to the neck in the vats of honey, and fill themselves tight as a drum to repair their exhausted strength; whereupon, with heavy steps, they go forth to meet the good, dreamless, and careless slumber that shall fold them in its’ embrace till the time for the next repast.

But the patience of the bees is not equal to that of men. One morning the long-expected word of command goes through the hive; and the peaceful workers turn into judges and executioners. Whence this word issues we know not; it would seem to emanate suddenly from the cold, deliberate, indignation of the workers; and no sooner has it been uttered than every heart throbs with it, inspired with the genius of the unanimous republic. One part of the people renounce their foraging duties to devote themselves to the work of justice. The great idle drones, asleep in unconscious groups on the melliferous walls, are rudely torn from their slumbers by an army of wrathful virgins. They wake, in pious wonder; they cannot believe their eyes; and their astonishment struggles through their sloth as a moonbeam through marshy water. They stare amazedly round them, convinced that they must be victims of some mistake; and the mother-idea of their life being first to assert itself in their dull brain, they take a step towards the vats of honey to seek comfort there. But ended for them are the days of May honey, the wine-flower of lime-trees and fragrant ambrosia of thyme and sage, of marjoram and white clover. Where the path once lay open to the kindly, abundant reservoirs, that so invitingly offered their waxen and sugary mouths, there stands now a burning-bush all alive with poisonous, bristling stings. The
atmosphere
of the city is changed; in lieu of the friendly perfume of honey the acrid odour of poison prevails; thousands of tiny drops glisten at the end of the stings, and diffuse rancour and hatred. Before the bewildered parasites are able to realize that the happy laws of the city have crumbled, dragging down in most inconceivable fashion their own plentiful destiny, each one is assailed by three or four envoys of
justice; and these vigorously proceed to cut off his wings, saw through the petiole that connects the abdomen with the thorax, amputate the feverish antennæ, and seek an opening between the rings of his cuirass through which to pass their sword. No defence is attempted by the enormous, but unarmed, creatures; they try to escape, or oppose their mere bulk to the blows that rain down upon them. Forced on to their back, with their relentless enemies clinging doggedly to them, they will use their powerful claws to shift them from side to side; or, turning on themselves, they will drag the whole group round and round in wild circles, which exhaustion soon brings to an end. And, in a very brief space, their appearance becomes so deplorable, that pity, never far from justice in the depths of our heart, quickly returns, and would seek forgiveness, though vainly, of the stern workers who recognise only Nature’s harsh and profound laws. The wings of the wretched creatures are torn, their antennæ bitten, the segments of their legs wrenched off; and their magnificent eyes, mirrors once of the exuberant flowers, flashing back the blue light and the innocent pride of summer, now, softened by suffering, reflect only the anguish and distress of their end. Some succumb to their wounds, and are at once borne away to distant cemeteries by two or three of their executioners. Others, whose injuries are less, succeed in sheltering themselves in some corner, where they lie, all huddled together, surrounded by an inexorable guard, until they perish of want. Many will reach the door and escape into space, dragging their adversaries with them; but, towards evening, impelled by hunger and cold, they return in crowds to the entrance of the hive to beg for shelter. But there they encounter another pitiless guard. The next morning, before setting forth on their journey, the workers will clear the threshold, strewn with the corpses of the useless giants; and all recollections of the idle race disappear till the following spring.