THE PINE MOTH
When March comes, the Caterpillars leave their nest and their pine-tree and go on their final trip. On the twentieth of March I spent a whole morning watching a file about three yards long, containing about a hundred of the Caterpillars, now much faded as to their coats. The procession toils grimly along, up and down over the uneven ground. Then it breaks into groups, which halt and form independent processions.
They have important business on hand. After two hours or so of marching, the little procession reaches the foot of a wall, where the soil is powdery, very dry, and easy to burrow in. The Caterpillar at the head of the row explores, and digs a little, as if to find out the nature of the ground. The others, trusting their leader, follow him blindly. Whatever he decides will be adopted by all. Finally the leading Caterpillar finds a spot he likes; he stops, and the others break up into a swarming heap. All their backs are joggling pell-mell; all their feet are raking; all their jaws are digging the soil. Little by little, they make a hole in which to bury themselves. For some time to come the tunneled soil cracks and rises and covers itself with little mole-hills; then all is still. The Caterpillars have descended to a depth of three inches, and are weaving, or about to weave, their cocoons.
Two weeks later I dug down and found them there, wrapped in scanty white silk, soiled with dirt. Sometimes, if the soil permits, they bury themselves as deep as nine inches.
How, then, does the Moth, that delicate creature, with her flimsy wings and sweeping antennæ-plumes, make her way above ground? She does not appear till the end of July or in August. By that time the soil is hard, having been beaten down by the rain and baked by the sun. Never could a Moth break her way through unless she had tools for the purpose and were dressed with great simplicity.
From some cocoons that I kept in test-tubes in my laboratory I found that the Pine Moth, on coming out of the cocoon, has her finery bundled up. She looks like a cylinder with rounded ends. The wings are pressed against her breast like narrow scarfs; the antennæ have not yet unfolded their plumes and are turned back along the Moth’s sides. Her hair fleece is laid flat, pointing backwards. Her legs alone are free, to help her through the soil.
She needs even more preparation, though, to bore her hole. If you pass the tip of your finger over her head you will feel a few very rough wrinkles. The magnifying-glass shows us that these are hard scales, of which the longest and strongest is the top one, in the middle of her forehead. There you have the center-bit of her boring-tool. I see the Moths in the sand in my test-tubes butting with their heads, jerking now in one direction, now in another. They are boring into the sand. By the following day they will have bored a shaft ten inches long and reached the surface.
When at last the Moth reaches the surface, she slowly spreads her bunched wings, extends her antennæ, and puffs out her fleece. She is all dressed now, as nicely as she can be. To be sure, she is not the most brilliant of our Moths, but she looks very well. Her upper wings are gray, striped with a few crinkly brown streaks; her under-wings white; throat covered with thick gray fur; abdomen clad in bright-russet velvet. The tip end of her body shines like pale gold. At first sight it looks bare, but it is not: it is covered with tiny scales, so close together that they look like one piece.
There is something interesting about these scales. However gently we touch them with the point of a needle, they fly off in great numbers. This is the golden fleece of which the mother robs herself to make the nest or muff for her eggs at the base of the pine-needles which we spoke of at the beginning of the story.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CABBAGE-CATERPILLAR
The cabbage is the oldest vegetable we possess. We know that people in classic times ate it, but it goes much further back than that, so that indeed we are ignorant of when or how mankind first began cultivating it. The botanists tell us that originally it was a long-stalked, scanty-leaved, ill-smelling wild plant which grew on ocean cliffs. History pays but little attention to such details: it celebrates the battlefields on which we meet our death, it thinks the plowed fields by which we thrive are not important enough to speak of; it can tell us the names of kings’ favorites, it cannot tell us of the beginning of wheat! Perhaps some day it will be written differently.
It is too bad that we do not know more about the cabbage, for it would have some very interesting things to teach us. It is certainly a treasure in itself. Other creatures think so besides man; and one of these is the Caterpillar of the common Large White Butterfly. This Caterpillar feeds on the leaves of the cabbage and all kinds of cabbagey plants, such as the cauliflower, the Brussels sprout, the kohlrabi, and the rutabaga, all near relatives of the cabbage.
It will feed also on other plants which belong to the cabbage family. They are all of the order of the Cruciferæ, so-called by the botanists because the petals are four in number and arranged in a cross. The White Butterfly lays her eggs only on this order of plants. How she knows them is a mystery. I have studied flowers and plants for fifty years and more, yet, if I wished to find out if a plant new to me was or was not one of the Cruciferæ, and there were no flowers or fruit to guide me, I should believe the White Butterfly’s record on the matter sooner than anything I could find in books.
The White Butterfly has two families a year: one in April and May, the other in September. This is just the time that cabbages are ripe in our part of the world. The Butterfly’s calendar agrees with the gardener’s. When there are provisions to be eaten, the Caterpillars are on hand.
The eggs are a bright orange-yellow and are laid in slabs, sometimes on the upper surface, sometimes on the lower surface of the leaves. The Caterpillars come out of their eggs in about a week, and the first thing they do is to eat the egg-shells, or egg-wrappers, before tackling the green leaves. It is the first time I have ever seen the grub make a meal of the sack in which it was born, and I wonder what reason it has. I suspect as follows: the leaves of the cabbage are waxed and slippery. To walk on them without falling off, the grub needs bits of silk, something for its legs to grip. To make this silk, it needs special food; so it eats the egg-wrapper, which is of a horny substance of the same nature as silk, and probably easily changed to the latter in the stomach of the little grub.
Soon the grubs get hungry for green food, and then the ruin of the cabbages commences. What appetites they have! I served up to a herd of these Caterpillars which I had in my laboratory a bunch of leaves picked from among the biggest cabbages: two hours later nothing was left but the thick middle veins. At this rate the cabbage bed will not last long.
The gluttonous Caterpillars do nothing at all but eat, unless we except a curious motion they sometimes indulge in. When several Caterpillars are grazing side by side, you sometimes see all the heads in the row briskly lifted and as briskly lowered, time after time, all together and as accurately as if they were Prussian soldiers drilling. I do not know whether this is their way of showing that they would fight, if necessary, or a sign of pleasure in the eating and the warm sun. Anyhow, it is the only exercise they take until they are full-grown and fat.
After a whole month of grazing, the Caterpillars at last have enough. They begin to climb in every direction. They walk about anyhow, with the front part of their bodies raised and searching space. It is now the beginning of cold weather, and my Caterpillar guests are in a small greenhouse. I leave the door of the house open. Soon the whole crowd have disappeared.
I find them scattered all over the neighboring walls, some thirty yards off. They are under ledges and eaves, which will serve them as shelters through the winter. The Cabbage-caterpillar is hardy and does not mind the cold.
In these shelters they weave themselves hammock cocoons and turn into chrysales, from which next spring the Moths will come.
We may be interested in the story of the Cabbage-caterpillar, but we know that there would be not enough cabbages for us if he were allowed full sway. So we are not ill-pleased to hear that there is still another insect who preys upon him and keeps him from being too numerous. If the Cabbage-caterpillar is our enemy, this insect is our friend. Yet she is so small, she works so discreetly, that the gardener does not know her, has not even heard of her. If he were to see her by accident, flitting around the plant which she protects, he would take no notice of her, would not dream of the help she is giving him. I am going to give the tiny midget her deserts.
Scientists call her by a name as long as she is tiny. Part of the name is Microgaster. It is what I shall have to call her, for she has no other that I know of. You must blame the wise scientists who named her that, and not me.
How does she work? Well, we shall see. In the spring, let us look about our kitchen-gardens. We can hardly help noticing against the walls or on the withered grasses at the foot of the hedges some very small yellow cocoons, heaped into masses the size of a hazel-nut. Beside each group lies a Cabbage-caterpillar, sometimes dead and always looking very tattered. These cocoons are the work of the Microgaster’s family, hatched or on the point of hatching; they have been feeding on the poor Caterpillar.
The little Microgaster or Midge is about the size of a Gnat. When the Caterpillar-moth lays her orange eggs on the cabbage leaves, the Midge hastens up and with a slender, horny prickle she possesses, lays her egg inside the film of the Moth’s egg. Often many Midges lay their little eggs in the same Moth’s egg. Judging by the cocoons, there are sometimes as many as sixty-five Midges to one Caterpillar.
As the Caterpillar grows up, it does not seem to suffer; it feeds on the cabbage leaves and, when that is done, makes its pilgrimage as usual to find the place where it will weave its cocoon. It even begins this work; but it is listless, it has no strength; it grows thin and dies. No wonder, with a host of worms of the little Microgaster in its body, drinking its blood! The Caterpillar has obligingly lived till just the time when the Microgaster’s worms are ready to come out. They do so, and begin to weave their cocoons, where they turn into Midges with the long name.
CHAPTER XV
THE GREAT PEACOCK MOTH
It was an evening long to be remembered, when the Great Peacock Moths came to my house. This Moth is magnificent, the largest in Europe, clad in maroon velvet, with a necktie of white fur. The wings are sprinkled with gray and brown, crossed by a faint zigzag and edged with smoky white, and they have in the center a round patch, a great eye with a black pupil and a many-colored iris containing black, white, chestnut, and purple arcs. The Moth is hatched from a Caterpillar also remarkable in appearance, being yellow with beads of turquoise-blue. It feeds on almond leaves.
Well, on the morning of the sixth of May, a female Great Peacock Moth came out of her cocoon in my presence, on the table of my insect-laboratory. I at once caged her under a wire-gauze bell-jar. I did not think much about the matter. I kept her on general principles, for I am always on the lookout for something to happen.
I was glad afterwards that I had done so. At nine o’clock in the evening, just as the household is going to bed, there is a great stir in the room next to mine. Little Paul, half-undressed, is rushing about, jumping and stamping, knocking the chairs over like a mad thing. I hear him call me:
“Come, quick!” he screams. “Come and see these Moths, big as birds! The room is full of them!”
I hurry in. The child has not exaggerated very much. The room is full of giant Moths. Four are already caught and lodged in a bird-cage. Many others are fluttering on the ceiling.
At this sight, I remember my prisoner of the morning.
“Put on your things, laddie,” I say to my son. “Leave your cage and come with me. We shall see something interesting.”
We run downstairs to go to my study, which is in the right wing of the house. In the kitchen I find the servant, who is also bewildered by what is happening and stands flicking her apron at great Moths whom she took at first for Bats. It seems that the Great Peacock has taken possession of pretty nearly every part of the house.
We enter my study, candle in hand. One of the windows had been left open, and what we see is unforgetable. With a soft flick-flack the great Moths fly around the bell-jar, alight, set off again, come back, fly up to the ceiling and down. They rush at the candle, putting it out with a stroke of their wings; they descend on our shoulders, clinging to our clothes, grazing our faces. The scene suggests a wizard’s cave, with its whirl of Bats. Little Paul holds my hand tighter than usual, to keep up his courage.
How many are there? About twenty in this room. Add to these the number who have strayed into the other parts of the house, and the total cannot be much short of forty. Forty lovers, who have come to pay their respects to the bride born that morning—the princess imprisoned in her tower!
Every night that week the Moths come to court their princess. It is stormy weather, so dark one can hardly see one’s hand before one’s face. Our house is difficult for them to reach. It is hidden by tall plane-trees, pines, and cypresses; clusters of bushy shrubs make a rampart a few steps away from the door. It is through this tangle, in complete darkness, that the Great Peacock has to tack about to reach his lady.
Under such conditions the Brown Owl would not dare leave the hole in his tree. Yet the Moth goes forward without hesitating and passes through without knocking against things. He steers his way so skillfully that he arrives in a state of perfect freshness, with his big wings unharmed, with not a scratch upon him. The darkness is light enough for him.
With a view to his wedding, the one and only object of his life, the Great Peacock is gifted with a wonderful talent. He is able to discover the object of his desire in spite of distance, obstacles, and darkness. For two or three evenings he is allowed a few hours to find his mate. If he cannot find her, all is over. He dies.
The Great Peacock knows nothing of eating. While so many other Moths, jolly companions one and all, flit from flower to flower, dipping into the honeyed cups, he never thinks of refreshment. No wonder he does not live long. Two or three evenings, just time enough to allow the couple to meet, and that is all; the big Moth has lived.
CHAPTER XVI
THE TRUFFLE-HUNTING BEETLE
Before we come to the Beetle, I must first tell you about my friend, the Dog, who hunts truffles, which are underground mushrooms. Dogs are quite often used for this purpose, and I have had the good fortune on several occasions to go with a Dog who was a great expert in this line. He was certainly nothing to look at, this artist whom I was so anxious to see at work: just a Dog, placid and deliberate in his ways, ugly, unkempt; the sort of Dog you would never have at your own fireside. Talent and poverty often go hand in hand.
His master, a celebrated truffle-gatherer in the village, was at first afraid that I wanted to steal his secrets and set up a rival business, but when he found that I only made drawings of mushrooms and set down lists of underground vegetable things, he let me join his expeditions.
It was agreed between us that the Dog should act as he pleased and receive a bit of bread as his reward after each discovery, no matter whether the underground mushroom he discovered was a real truffle, the kind people like to eat, or an uneatable one. In no case was the master to drive the dog away from a spot where experience told him there was nothing salable to be found. As far as my studies went, I did not care whether the mushrooms were edible or not.
Conducted in this way, the expedition was very successful. The busy Dog trotted along with his nose to the wind, at a moderate pace. Every little while he stopped, questioned the ground with his nostrils, scratched for a few seconds, without too much excitement, then looked up at his master as if to say:
“Here we are, here we are! On my word of honor as a Dog, there’s a truffle here.”
And he spoke the truth. The master dug at the spot indicated. If the trowel went astray, the Dog showed the man how to put it right by sniffing at the bottom of the hole. The mushroom was always there. A Dog’s nose cannot lie. But he made us gather all sorts of underground mushrooms: the large and the small, the fresh and the decayed, the scented and the unscented, the fragrant and those which were the reverse. I was surprised at my collection, which included most of the underground fungi of the neighborhood.
Is it smell as we understand it that guides the Dog in his search? I do not believe that it is, otherwise he would not point out so many varieties which smell so very different. He must perceive something that we cannot. It is a mistake to compare everything by human standards. There are more sensations in the world than we know of. Such secrets are known to insects better than to other animals, like the Dog or the Pig, who also hunts truffles with its nose. We will hear now about the Truffle-hunting Beetle.
This is a pretty little black Beetle, with a pale and velvety belly, round as a cherry-stone and much the same size. By rubbing the tip of its abdomen against the edge of its wing-cases it makes a soft chirrup like that which little birds make when their mother comes with their food. The male wears a graceful horn on his head.
I found these Beetles in a certain pine-woods where there are plenty of mushrooms. It is a pleasant place, where my whole family like to go in the mild days of autumn. They find everything there: old Magpies’ nests, made of bundles of twigs; Jays squabbling with each other, after filling their crops with acorns on the oaks hard by; Rabbits suddenly starting out of a rosemary bush, showing their little white upturned tails. There is lovely sand for the children to dig tunnels in, sand that is easy to build into rows of huts which we thatch with moss and top with a bit of reed by way of a chimney. And when we are there we lunch off an apple to the sound of the Æolian harps of the breezes softly sighing through the pine-needles!
Yes, for the children it is a real paradise. The grown-ups also enjoy it, and one of my chief enjoyments is watching my Truffle-beetle. His burrows may be seen here and there. The door is left open and surrounded merely by a padding of sand. The burrow is about nine inches deep, going straight down in very loose soil. When I cut into it with a knife, I often find that it is empty. The insect has left during the night, having finished its business there and gone to settle elsewhere. The Truffle-beetle is a tramp, a night-walker, who leaves his home whenever he feels like it and easily gets a new one. Sometimes I do find the insect at the bottom of the pit, always alone, sometimes a male, sometimes a female, never two at the same time. The burrow is not a house for the family; it is a sort of bachelor house, dug for comfort only for the solitary Beetle.
The Beetle in this house is clutching a small mushroom, usually partly eaten. He will not part from it. It is his treasure, his worldly goods. Scattered crumbs tell us that we have caught him feasting.
When we take his prize away from him we find that it is a sort of little underground mushroom, closely related to the truffle.
This throws a light upon the habits of the Beetle and his reason for making new burrows so often. In the calm of the twilight, the little gadabout takes to the fields, chirruping softly as he goes, cheering himself with song. He explores the soil, questions it as to its contents, just as the Dog does when hunting for truffles. His sense of smell tells him when the coveted morsel is underneath, covered by a few inches of sand. Certain of the exact spot where the thing lies, he digs straight down and never fails to reach it. As long as the provisions last, he does not go out again. Blissfully he feeds at the bottom of the well he has dug to reach the mushroom. He does not care whether his door is open or not.
When he has eaten all his food, he moves, looking for more, and to find it he digs a new burrow, which will be given up in its turn. Thus he spends all autumn and the next spring, the seasons for mushrooms, traveling from one of his little hotels to another.
This truffle which the Beetle hunts appears to have no particular odor. How, then, can he detect it from the ground over the place where it is buried? He is a clever Beetle, and we do not know yet just how he manages it.
CHAPTER XVII
THE BOY WHO LOVED INSECTS
Nowadays, people lay everything to heredity; that is, they say that human beings and animals both receive their special talents from their ancestors, who have perhaps been developing them through many generations. I do not altogether agree with this theory. I am going to tell you my own story to show that I did not inherit my passion for insects from any of my ancestors.
Neither my grandfather nor my grandmother on my mother’s side cared in the least about insects. I did not know my grandfather, but I know that he had a hard time making a living, and I am sure the only attention he paid to an insect, if he met it, was to crush it under his foot. Grandmother, who could not even read, certainly cared nothing about science or insects. If, sometimes, when rinsing her salad at the tap, she found a Caterpillar on the lettuce leaves, with a start of fright she would fling the loathsome thing away.
My other grandparents, my father’s father and mother, I knew well. Indeed, I went to live with them when I was five or six years old, because my father and mother were too poor to take care of me. These grandparents lived on a poverty-stricken farm away out in the country. They did not know how to read; they had never opened a book in their lives. Grandfather knew a great deal about cows and sheep, but nothing about anything else. How dumfounded he would have been to learn that, in the distant future, one of his family would spend his time studying insignificant insects! If he had guessed that that lunatic was myself, seated at the table by his side, what a smack I should have caught in the neck!
“The idea of wasting one’s time with that nonsense!” he would have thundered.
Grandmother, dear soul, was too busy with washing the clothes, minding the children, seeing to the meals of the household, spinning, attending to the chickens, curds and whey, butter, and pickles, to think of anything else. Sometimes, in the evenings, she used to tell us stories, as we sat around the fire, about the Wolf who lived on the moors. I should have very much liked to see this Wolf, the hero of so many tales that made our flesh creep, but I never did. I owe a great deal to you, dear grandmother; it was in your lap that I found consolation for my first sorrows. You have handed down to me, perhaps, a little of your physical vigor, a little of your love for work; but certainly you did not give me my love for insects.
Nor did either of my own parents. My mother was quite illiterate; my father had been to school as a child, he knew how to read and write a little, but he was too busy making a living to have room for any other cares. A good cuff or two when he saw me pinning an insect to a cork was all the encouragement I received from him.
And yet I began to observe, to inquire into things, when I was still almost a baby. My first memories of this tendency will amuse you. One day when I was five or six years old I was standing on the moor in front of our farm, clad in a soiled frieze frock flapping against my bare heels: I remember the handkerchief hanging from my waist by a bit of string,—a handkerchief, I am sorry to say, often lost and replaced by the back of my sleeve.
My face was turned toward the sun. The dazzling splendor fascinated me. No Moth was ever more attracted by the light of the lamp. As I stood there, I was asking myself a question. With what was I enjoying the glorious radiance, with my mouth or my eyes? Reader, do not smile: this was true scientific curiosity. I opened my mouth wide and closed my eyes: the glory disappeared. I opened my eyes and shut my mouth: the glory reappeared. I repeated the performance, with the same result. The question was solved: I had learned by deduction that I see the sun with my eyes. Oh, what a discovery! That evening, I told the whole house about it. Grandmother smiled lovingly at my simplicity: the others laughed at it.
Another find. At nightfall, amidst the neighboring bushes, a sort of jingle attracted my attention, sounding very faintly and softly through the evening silence. Who is making that noise? Is it a little Bird chirping in his nest? We must look into the matter and that quickly. True, there is a Wolf, who comes out of the woods at this time, so they tell me. Let’s go all the same, but not too far: just there, behind that clump of gloom.
I stand on the lookout for long, but all in vain. At the faintest sound of movement in the brushwood, the jingle ceases. I try again next day and the day after. This time, my stubborn watch succeeds. Whoosh! A grab of my hand and I hold the singer. It is not a Bird; it is a kind of Grasshopper whose hind-legs my playfellows have taught me to like; a poor reward for my long hiding. The best part of the business is not the two haunches with the shrimpy flavor, but what I have just learned. I now know, from personal observation, that the Grasshopper sings. I did not tell of my discovery, for fear of the same laughter that had greeted my story about the sun.
Oh, what pretty flowers, in a field close to the house! They seem to smile at me with their great violet eyes. Later on, I see, in their place, bunches of big red cherries. I taste them. They are not nice and they have no stones. What can those cherries be? At the end of the summer, grandfather comes with a spade and turns my field topsy-turvy. From underground there comes, by the basketful and sackful, a sort of round root. I know that root; it abounds in the house; time after time I have cooked it in the peat-stove. It is the potato. Its violet flower and its red fruit are pigeonholed for good and all in my memory.
With an ever-watchful eye for animals and plants, the future observer, the little six-year-old monkey, practiced by himself, all unawares. He went to the flower, he went to the insect, even as the Large White Butterfly goes to the cabbage and the Red Admiral to the thistle. He looked and inquired, drawn by a curiosity whereof heredity did not know the secret.
A little later on I am back in the village, in my father’s house. I am now seven years old; and it is high time that I went to school. Nothing could have turned out better; the master is my godfather. What shall I call the room in which I was to become acquainted with the alphabet? It would be difficult to find the exact word, because the room served for every purpose. It was at once a school, a kitchen, a bedroom, a dining-room and, at times, a chicken-house and a piggery. Palatial schools were not dreamed of in those days; any wretched hovel was thought good enough.
A broad fixed ladder led to the floor above. Under the ladder stood a big bed in a boarded recess. What was there upstairs? I never quite knew. I would see the master sometimes bring down an armful of hay for the Ass, sometimes a basket of potatoes which the housewife emptied into the pot in which the little porkers’ food was cooked. It must have been a sort of loft, a storehouse of provisions for man and beast. Those two rooms were all there were in the whole dwelling.
“The fire was not exactly lit for us.
”
To return to the lower one, the schoolroom: a window faces south, the only window in the house, a low, narrow window whose frame you can touch at the same time with your head and both your shoulders. This sunny opening is the only lively spot in the dwelling; it overlooks the greater part of the village, which straggles along the slopes of a slanting valley. In the window-recess is the master’s little table.
The opposite wall contains a niche in which stands a gleaming copper pail full of water. Here the parched children can relieve their thirst when they please, with a cup left within their reach. At the top of the niche are a few shelves bright with pewter plates, dishes, and drinking-vessels, which are taken down from their sanctuary on great occasions only.
More or less everywhere, at any spot which the light touches, are crudely colored pictures pasted on the walls. Against the far wall stands the large fireplace. In the middle is the hearth, but, on the right and left, are two breast-high recesses, half wood and half stone. Each of them is a bed, with a mattress stuffed with chaff of winnowed corn. Two sliding planks serve as shutters and close the chest if the sleeper would be alone. These beds are used by the favored ones of the house, the two boarders. They must lie snug in there at night, with their shutters closed, when the north wind howls at the mouth of the dark valley and sends the snow awhirl. The rest is occupied by the hearth and its accessories: the three-legged stools; the salt-box, hanging against the wall to keep its contents dry; the heavy shovel which it takes two hands to wield; lastly, the bellows like those with which I used to blow out my cheeks in grandfather’s house. They are made of a mighty branch of pine, hollowed throughout its length with a red-hot iron. One blows through this channel. With a couple of stones for supports, the master’s bundle of sticks and our own logs blaze and flicker, each of us having to bring a log of wood in the morning, if he would share in the treat.
For that matter, the fire was not exactly lit for us, but, above all, to warm a row of three pots in which simmered the Pigs’ food, a mixture of potatoes and bran. That, in spite of our each giving a log, was the real object of the brushwood-fire. The two boarders, on their stools, in the best places, and we others sitting on our heels, formed a semicircle around those big kettles, full to the brim and giving off little jets of steam, with puff-puff-puffing sounds. The bolder among us, when the master was not looking, would dig a knife into a well-cooked potato and add it to their bit of bread; for I must say that, if we did little work in my school, at least we did a deal of eating. It was the regular custom to crack a few nuts and nibble at a crust while writing our page or setting out our rows of figures.
We, the smaller ones, in addition to the comfort of studying with our mouths full, had every now and then two other delights, which were quite as good as cracking nuts. The back-door gave upon the yard where the Hen, surrounded by her brood of Chicks, scratched, while the little Pigs, of whom there were a dozen, wallowed in their stone trough. This door would open sometimes to let one of us out, a privilege which we abused, for the sly ones among us were careful not to close it on returning. Forthwith, the porkers would come running in, one after the other, attracted by the smell of the boiled potatoes. My bench, the one where the youngsters sat, stood against the wall, under the copper pail, and was right in the way of the Pigs. Up they came trotting and grunting, curling their little tails; they rubbed against our legs; they poked their cold pink snouts into our hands in search of a scrap of crust; they questioned us with their sharp little eyes to learn if we happened to have a dry chestnut for them in our pockets. When they had gone the round, some this way and some that, they went back to the farmyard, driven away by a friendly flick of the master’s handkerchief.
Next came the visit of the Hen, bringing her velvet-coated Chicks to see us. All of us eagerly crumbled a little bread for our pretty visitors. We vied with one another in calling them to us and tickling with our fingers their soft and downy backs.
What could we learn in such a school as that! Each of the younger pupils had, or rather was supposed to have, in his hands a little penny book, the alphabet, printed on gray paper. It began, on the cover, with a Pigeon, or something like it. Next came a cross, with the letters in their order. But, if the little book was to be of any use, the master should have shown us something about it. For this, the worthy man, too much taken up with the big ones, had not the time. He gave us the book only to make us look like scholars. We were to study it on our bench, to decipher it with the help of our next neighbor, in case he might know one or two of the letters. Our studying came to nothing, being every moment disturbed by a visit to the potatoes in the stew-pots, a quarrel among playmates about a marble, the grunting invasion of the little Pigs or the arrival of the Chicks.
The big ones used to write. They had the benefit of the small amount of light in the room, by the narrow window, and of the large and only table with its circle of seats. The school supplied nothing, not even a drop of ink; every one had to come with a full set of utensils. The inkhorn of those days was a long cardboard box divided into two parts. The upper compartment held the pens, made of goose- or turkey-quill trimmed with a penknife; the lower contained, in a tiny well, ink made of soot mixed with vinegar.
The master’s great business was to mend the pens—and then to trace at the head of the white page a line of strokes, single letters, or words, according to the scholar’s capabilities. When that is over keep an eye on the work of art which is coming to adorn the copy! With what undulating movements of the wrist does the master’s hand, resting on the little finger, prepare and plan its flight! All at once the hand starts off, flies, whirls; and lo and behold, under the line of writing is unfurled a garland of circles, spirals, and flourishes, framing a bird with outspread wings, the whole, if you please, in red ink, the only kind worthy of such a pen. Large and small, we stood awestruck in the presence of these marvels.
What was read at my school? At most, in French, a few selections from sacred history. Latin came oftener, to teach us to sing vespers properly.
And history, geography? No one ever heard of them. What difference did it make to us whether the earth was round or square! In either case, it was just as hard to make it bring forth anything.
And grammar? The master troubled his head very little about that; and we still less. And arithmetic? Yes, we did a little of this, but not under that learned name. We called it sums. On Saturday evening, to finish up the week, there was a general orgy of sums. The top boys stood up and, in a loud voice, recited the multiplication table up to twelve times. When this recital was over, the whole class, the little ones included, took it up in chorus, creating such an uproar that Chicks and porkers took to flight if they happened to be there.
When all is said, our master was an excellent man who could have kept school very well but for his lack of one thing; and that was time. He managed the property of an absentee landlord. He had under his care an old castle with four towers, which had become so many pigeon-houses; he directed the getting-in of the hay, the walnuts, the apples and the oats. We used to help him during the summer. Lessons at that time were less dull. They were often given on the hay or on the straw; oftener still, lesson-time was spent in cleaning out the dove-cot or stamping on the Snails that had sallied in rainy weather from their fortresses, the tall box borders of the garden belonging to the castle.
Our master was a barber. With his light hand, which was so clever at beautifying our copies with curlicue birds, he shaved the notabilities of the place: the mayor, the parish-priest, the notary. Our master was a bell-ringer. A wedding or a christening interrupted the lessons; he had to ring a peal. A gathering storm gave us a holiday; the great bell must be tolled to ward off the lightning and the hail. Our master was a choir-singer. Our master wound up and regulated the village-clock. This was his proudest duty. Giving a glance at the sun, to tell the time more or less nearly, he would climb to the top of the steeple, open a huge cage of rafters and find himself in a maze of wheels and springs whereof the secret was known to him alone.
With such a school and such a master and such examples, what will become of my natural tastes, as yet so undeveloped? In those surroundings, they seem bound to perish, stifled forever. Yet no, the germ has life; it works in my veins, never to leave them again. It finds food everywhere, down to the cover of my penny alphabet, beautified with a crude picture of a Pigeon which I study much more eagerly than the A B C. Its round eye, with its circlet of dots, seems to smile upon me. Its wing, of which I count the feathers one by one, tells me of flights on high, among the beautiful clouds; it carries me to the beeches raising their smooth trunks above a mossy carpet studded with white mushrooms that look like eggs, dropped by some wandering hen; it takes me to the snow-clad peaks where the birds leave the starry print of their red feet. He is a fine fellow, my Pigeon-friend; he consoles me for the woes hidden behind the cover of my book. Thanks to him, I sit quietly on my bench and wait more or less till school is over.
School out-of-doors has other charms. When the master takes us to kill the Snails in the box borders, I do not always do so. My heel sometimes hesitates before coming down upon the handful which I have gathered. They are so pretty! Just think, there are yellow ones and pink, white ones and brown, all with dark spiral streaks. I fill my pockets with the handsomest, so as to feast my eyes on them at my leisure.
On hay-making days in the master’s field, I strike up an acquaintance with the Frog. Flayed and stuck at the end of a split stick, he serves as bait to tempt the Crayfish to come out of his retreat by the brook-side. On the alder-trees I catch the Hoplia, the splendid Beetle who pales the azure of the heavens. I pick the narcissus and learn to gather, with the tip of my tongue, the tiny drop of honey that lies right at the bottom of the cleft corolla. I also learn that too-long indulgence in this feast brings a headache; but this discomfort in no way impairs my admiration for the glorious white flower, which wears a narrow red collar at the throat of its funnel.
When we go to beat the walnut-trees, the barren grass-plots provide me with Locusts spreading their wings, some into a blue fan, others into a red. And thus the country school, even in the heart of winter, furnished continuous food for my interest in things. My passion for animals and plants made progress of itself.
What did not make progress was my acquaintance with my letters, greatly neglected in favor of the Pigeon. I was still at the same stage, hopelessly behindhand with the alphabet, when my father, by a chance inspiration, brought me home from the town what was to give me a start along the road of reading. It was a large print, price three cents, colored and divided into compartments in which animals of all sorts taught the A B C by means of the first letters of their names. You began with the sacred beast, the Donkey, whose name, Âne, with a big initial, taught me the letter A. The Bœuf, the Ox, stood for B; the Canard, the Duck, told me about C; the Dindon, the Turkey, gave me the letter D. And so on with the rest. A few compartments, it is true, were lacking in clearness. I had no friendly feeling for the Hippopotamus, the Kamichi, or Horned Screamer, and the Zebu, who aimed at making me say H, K, and Z. No matter; father came to my aid in hard cases; and I made such rapid progress that, in a few days, I was able to turn in good earnest the pages of my little Pigeon-book, hitherto so undecipherable. I was initiated; I knew how to spell. My parents marveled. I can explain this unexpected progress to-day. Those speaking pictures, which brought me amongst my friends the beasts, were in harmony with my tastes. I have the animals to thank for teaching me to read. Animals forever!
Luck favored me a second time. As a reward for learning to read, I was given La Fontaine’s Fables, in a popular, cheap edition, crammed with pictures, small, I admit, and very inaccurate, but still delightful. Here were the Crow, the Fox, the Wolf, the Magpie, the Frog, the Rabbit, the Donkey, the Dog, the Cat; all persons of my acquaintance. The glorious book was immensely to my taste, with its skimpy illustrations in which the animals walked and talked. As to understanding what it said, that was another story! Never mind, my lad! Put together syllables that say nothing to you as yet; they will speak to you later and La Fontaine will always remain your friend.
I come to the time when I was ten years old and at Rodez College. I was well thought of in the school, for I cut a good figure in composition and translation. In that classical atmosphere, there was talk of Procas, King of Alba, and of his two sons, Numitor and Amulius. We heard of Cynœgirus, the strong-jawed man, who, having lost his two hands in battle, seized and held a Persian galley with his teeth, and of Cadmus the Phœnician, who sowed a dragon’s teeth as though they were beans and gathered his harvest in the shape of a host of armed men, who killed one another as they rose up from the ground. The only one who survived the slaughter was one as tough as leather, presumably the son of the big back grinder-tooth.
Had they talked to me about the man in the moon, I could not have been more startled. I made up for it with my animals. While admiring Cadmus and Cynœgirus, I hardly ever failed, on Sundays and Thursdays, to go and see if the cowslip or the yellow daffodil was making its appearance in the meadows, if the Linnet was hatching on the juniper-bushes, if the Cockchafers were plopping down from the wind-shaken poplars.
By easy stages I came to Virgil and was very much smitten with Melibœus, Corydon, Menalcas, Damœtas and the rest of them. Within the frame in which the characters moved were exquisite details concerning the Bee, the Cicada, the Turtle-dove, the Crow, the Nanny-goat, and the golden broom. A real delight were these stories of the fields, sung in sonorous verse; and the Latin poet left a lasting impression on my classical recollections.
Then, suddenly, good-by to my studies, good-by to Tityrus and Menalcas. Ill-luck is swooping down on us, relentlessly. Hunger threatens us at home. And now, boy, put your trust in God; run about and earn your penn’orth of potatoes as best you can. Life is about to become a hideous inferno. Let us pass quickly over this phase.
During this sad time, my love for the insects ought to have gone under. Not at all. I still remember a certain Pine Cockchafer met for the first time. The plumes on her antennæ, her pretty pattern of white spots on a dark-brown ground, were as a ray of sunshine in the gloomy wretchedness of the day.
To cut a long story short: good fortune, which never abandons the brave, brought me to the primary normal school at Vaucluse, where I was certain of food: dried chestnuts and chick-peas. The principal, a man of broad views, soon came to trust his new assistant. He left me practically a free hand so long as I satisfied the school curriculum, which was very modest in those days. I was a little ahead of my fellow-pupils. I took advantage of this to get some order into my vague knowledge of plants and animals. While a dictation lesson was being corrected around me, I would examine, in the recesses of my desk, the oleander’s fruit, the snap-dragon’s seed-vessel, the Wasp’s sting and the Ground-beetle’s wing-case.
With this foretaste of natural science, picked up haphazard and secretly, I left school more deeply in love than ever with insects and flowers. And yet I had to give it all up. Natural history could not bring me anywhere. The schoolmasters of the time despised it; Latin, Greek, and mathematics were the subjects to study.
So I flung myself with might and main into higher mathematics: a hard battle, if ever there was one, without teachers, face to face for days on end with abstruse problems. Next I studied the physical sciences in the same manner, with an impossible laboratory, the work of my own hands. I went against my feelings: I buried my natural-history books at the bottom of my trunk.
And so, in the end, I am sent to teach physics and chemistry at Ajaccio College. This time, the temptation is too much for me. The sea, with its wonders, the beach, covered with beautiful shells, the myrtles, arbutus, and other trees; all this paradise of gorgeous nature is more attractive than geometry and trigonometry. I give up. I divide my spare time into two parts. The larger part is devoted to mathematics, by which I expect to make my way in the world; the other is spent, with much misgiving, in botanizing and looking for the treasures of the sea.
We never know what will happen to us. Mathematics, on which I spent so much time in my youth, has been of hardly any good to me; and animals, which I avoided as much as ever I could, are the consolation of my old age.
I met two famous scientists in Ajaccio: Requien, a well-known botanist, and Moquin-Tandom, who gave me my first lesson in natural history. He stayed at my house, as the hotel was full. The day before he left he said to me:
“You interest yourself in shells. That is something, but it is not enough. You must look into the animal itself. I will show you how it’s done.”
He took a sharp pair of scissors from the family work-basket and a couple of needles, and showed me the anatomy of a snail in a soup-plate filled with water. Gradually he explained and sketched the organs which he spread before my eyes. This was the only, the never-to-be-forgotten lesson in natural history that I ever received in my life.
It is time to finish this story about myself. It shows that from early childhood I have felt drawn towards the things of nature. I have the gift of observation. Why and how? I do not know.
We have all of us, men and animals, some special gift. One child takes to music, another is always modeling things out of clay; another is quick at figures. It is the same way with insects. One kind of Bee can cut leaves; another builds clay houses, Spiders know how to make webs. These gifts exist because they exist, and that is all any one can say. In human beings, we call the special gift genius. In an insect, we call it instinct. Instinct is the animal’s genius.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BANDED SPIDER
In the disagreeable season of the year, when the insect has nothing to do and retires to winter quarters, an observer who looks in the sunny nooks, grubs in the sand, lifts the stones, or searches the brushwood, will often find something very interesting, a real work of art. Happy are they who can appreciate such treasures! I wish them all the joys they have brought me and will continue to bring me, in spite of the vexations of life, which grow ever more bitter as the years follow their swift downward course.
Should the seekers rummage among the wild grasses in the willow-beds and thickets, I wish them the delight of finding the wonderful object that, at this moment, lies before my eyes. It is the work of a Spider, the nest of the Banded Spider.
In bearing and coloring, this Spider is among the handsomest that I know. On her fat body, nearly as large as a hazel-nut, are alternate yellow, black, and silver sashes, to which she owes her name of Banded. Her eight long legs, with their dark-brown and pale-brown rings, surround her body like the spokes of a wheel.
Any small prey suits her; and, as long as she can find supports for her web, she settles wherever the Locust hops, wherever the Fly hovers, wherever the Dragon-fly dances or the Butterfly flits. Usually, because of the greater abundance of game there, she spreads her web across some brooklet, from bank to bank, among the rushes. She also stretches it sometimes in the thickets of evergreen oak, on the slopes with the scrubby grass, dear to Grasshoppers.
Her hunting-weapon is a large upright web, whose outer boundary is fastened to the neighboring branches by a number of moorings. Her web is like that of the other weaving Spiders. Straight threads run out like spokes of a wheel from a central point. Over these runs a continuous spiral thread, forming chords, or cross-bars, from the center to the circumference. It is magnificently large and magnificently symmetrical.
In the lower part of the web, starting from the center, a thick wide ribbon descends zigzag-wise across the spokes. This is the Spider’s trademark, the way she signs her work of art. Also, the strong silk zigzag gives greater firmness to the web.
The net needs to be firm to hold the heavy insects that light on it. The Spider cannot pick and choose her prizes. Seated motionless in the center of the web, her eight legs widespread to feel the shaking of the network in any direction, she waits for what luck will bring her: sometimes some giddy weak thing unable to control its flight, sometimes some powerful prey rushing headlong with a reckless bound.
The Locust in particular, the fiery Locust, who releases the spring of his long shanks at random, often falls into the trap. One imagines that his strength ought to frighten the Spider; the kick of his spurred legs should enable him to make a hole then and there in the web and to get away. But not at all. If he does not free himself at the first effort, the Locust is lost.
Turning her back on the game, the Banded Spider works all her spinnerets—the spinneret is the organ with which she makes her silk, and is pierced with tiny holes like the mouth of a watering-pot—at one and the same time. She gathers the silky spray with her hind-legs, which are longer than the others and open wide apart to allow the silk to spread. In this way the Spider obtains not a thread but a rainbow-colored sheet, a sort of clouded fan wherein the threads are kept almost separate. Her two hind-legs fling this sheet, or shroud, by rapid alternate armfuls, while, at the same time, they turn the Locust over and over, swathing it completely.
The gladiator of old times, when forced to fight against powerful wild beasts, appeared in the ring with a rope-net folded over his left shoulder. The animal made its spring. The man, with a sudden movement of his right arm, cast the net as a fisherman does; he covered the beast and tangled it in the meshes. A thrust of the trident, or three-pronged spear, gave the finishing touch to the vanquished foe.
The Spider works in the same way, with this advantage, that she can renew her armful of fetters. If the first is not enough, a second instantly follows, and another and yet another until she has used up all her silk.
When all movement ceases under the snowy winding-sheet, the Spider goes up to her bound prisoner. She has a better weapon than the gladiator’s three-pronged spear: she has her poison-fangs. She gnaws at the Locust. When she has finished, she flings the clean-bled remains out of the net and returns to her waiting-place in the centre of the web.
