THE OLD WEEVILS
In winter, when the insect enjoys an enforced rest, the study of numismatics procures me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins, scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns his sod. He brings them to me and consults me as to their pecuniary value, never as to their meaning.
What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove! Men suffered of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future: to him, all history is summed up in that! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime of the idle.
I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the past. I scratch the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully strip it of its earthy rind, I examine it with the magnifying-glass, I try to decipher its legend. And my satisfaction is no small one when the little round bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read a page of humanity, not in books, which are witnesses open to suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were contemporary with the persons and the facts. [[172]]
This bit of silver, flattened by the blow of the punch, talks to me of the Vocontii:[1] “VOOC … VOCVNT,” says the inscription. It comes from the little neighbouring town of Vaison, where Pliny the Naturalist sometimes went to spend a holiday. Here, perhaps, at the table of his host, the celebrated compiler, he learnt to appreciate the beccafico, famous among the epicures of Rome and still renowned to-day, under the name of grasset, among our Provençal gastronomers. It is a shame that my bit of silver says nothing of these events, more memorable than a battle.
It shows, on one side, a head and, on the other, a galloping horse, all barbarously inaccurate. A child trying its hand for the first time with the point of a pebble on the fresh mortar of the walls would produce no more shapeless design. Nay, of a surety, those gallant Allobroges were no artists.
How greatly superior to them were the foreigners from Phocæa! Here is a drachma of the Massalietes:[2] ΜΑΣΣΑΛΙΗΤΩΝ. On the obverse, a head of Diana of Ephesus, chub-faced, full-cheeked, thick-lipped. A receding forehead, surmounted by a diadem; an abundant head of hair, streaming down the neck in a cascade of curls; heavy ear-drops, a necklace of pearls, a bow slung over the shoulder. Thus was the idol decked by the hands of the pious maidens of Syria. To tell the truth, it is not beautiful. It is sumptuous, if you will, and preferable, after all, to the ass’s ears which the beauties [[173]]of our days wear perched upon their heads. What a singular freak is fashion, so fruitful in the means of uglification! Business knows nothing of beauty, says this divinity of the traders; it prefers the profitable, embellished with luxury. Thus speaks the drachma.
On the reverse, a lion clawing the earth and roaring wide-mouthed. Not of to-day alone is the savagery that symbolizes power under the form of some formidable brute, as though evil were the supreme expression of strength. The eagle, the lion and other bandits often figure on the reverse of coins. But the reality is not sufficient; the imagination invents monstrosities: the centaur, the dragon, the hippogriff, the unicorn, the double-headed eagle. Are the inventors of these emblems really superior to the redskin who celebrates the prowess of his scalping-knife with a bear’s paw, an eagle’s wing or a jaguar’s tooth stuck into his scalp-lock? We may safely doubt it.
How preferable to these heraldic horrors is the reverse of our own silver coinage brought into circulation of late years! It shows us a sower who, with a nimble hand, at sunrise, fills the furrow with the good seed of thought. It is very simple and it is great; it makes us think.
The Marseilles drachma has for its sole merit its magnificent relief. The artist who made the dies was a master of the graver’s tool; but he lacked the breath of inspiration. The chub-faced Diana is a rakes’ wench and no better.
Here is the NAMASAT of the Volscæ, which became the colony of Nîmes. Side by side, profiles of Augustus and his minister Agrippa. The former, with his hard brow, his flat skull, his grasping, broken nose, inspires me with [[174]]but little confidence, notwithstanding what gentle Virgil wrote of him:
Deus nobis haec otia fecit.
It is success that makes gods. Had he not succeeded in his criminal projects, Augustus the divine would have remained Octavius the scoundrel.
His minister pleases me better. He was a great shifter of stones, who, with his building operations, his aqueducts, his roads, came to civilize the rustic Volscæ a little. Not far from my village, a splendid road crosses the plain in a straight line, starting from the banks of the Aygues, and climbs up yonder, tedious in its monotonous length, to cross the Sérignan hills, under the protection of a powerful oppidum, which, much later, became the old castle, the Castelas. It is a section of Agrippa’s Road, which joined Marseilles and Vienne. The majestic ribbon, twenty centuries old, is still frequented. We no longer see the little brown foot-soldier of the Roman legions upon it; in his stead, we see the peasant going to market at Orange, with his flock of sheep or his drove of unruly porkers. And I prefer the latter.
Let us turn over the green-crusted penny. “COL. NEM.,”[3] colony of Nîmes, the reverse tells us. The inscription is accompanied by a crocodile chained to a palm-tree from which hang crowns. It is an emblem of Egypt, conquered by the veterans who founded the colony. The beast of the Nile gnashes its teeth at the foot of the familiar tree. It speaks to us of Antony, the rip; it tells us of Cleopatra, whose nose, had it been an inch shorter, would have changed the face of the world. Thanks to the memories which it awakens, the scaly-rumped reptile becomes a superb historical lesson. [[175]]
In this way, the great lessons of the numismatical science of metals could follow one another for many a day and be constantly varied without leaving my near neighbourhood. But there is another science of numismatics, far superior and less costly, which, with its medals, the fossils, tells us the history of life. I speak of the numismatics of stones.
My very window-ledge, the confidant of bygone ages, talks to me of a vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, each particle of which retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived. Spines of sea-urchins, teeth and vertebræ of fish, broken pieces of shells, shivers of madrepores form a pulp of dead existences. Examined ashlar by ashlar, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a rag-fair of things that were alive in the days of old.
The rocky layer from which building-materials are derived in these parts covers, with its mighty shell, the greater portion of the neighbouring upland. Here the quarry-man has dug for none knows how many centuries, since the time when Agrippa hewed cyclopean flags to form the stages and façade of the Orange theatre. And here, daily, the pick-axe uncovers curious fossils. The most remarkable of these are teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone, bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction! [[176]]
The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon. The shark of to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant.
Other Squali abound in the same stone, all fierce gullets. It contains Oxyrhinæ (Oxyrhina Xiphodon, Agass.), with teeth shaped like pointed cleavers; Hemipristes (Hemipristis Serra, Agass.), whose jaws are furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiæ (Lamia Denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with flexuous, steeled daggers, flattened on one side, convex on the other; Notidani (Notidanus Primigenius, Agass.), whose sunk teeth are crowned with radiate indentations.
This dental arsenal, the eloquent witness of the old butcheries, can hold its own with the Crocodile of Nîmes, the Diana of Marseilles, the Horse of Vaison. With its panoply of carnage, it tells me how extermination came at all times to lop off the surplus of life; it says:
“On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a shiver of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with truculent devourers and peaceable victims. A long gulf occupied the future site of the Rhône Valley. Its billows broke at no great distance from your dwelling.”
Here, in fact, are the cliffs of the bank, in such a state of preservation that, on concentrating my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of the waves. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, Petricolæ, Pholaidids have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one’s fist, round cells, cabins with a narrow conduit-pipe through which the recluse received the incoming water, constantly renewed and laden with nourishment. Sometimes, the erstwhile occupant is there, [[177]]mineralized, intact to the tiniest details of his striæ and scales, a frail ornament; more often, he has disappeared, dissolved, and his house has filled with a fine sea mud, hardened into a chalky kernel.
In this quiet inlet, some eddy has collected and drowned at the bottom of the mire, now turned into marl, enormous heaps of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up oysters a cubit long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could shovel up, in the immense pile, Scallops, Cones, Cytheridæ, Mactridæ, Murices, Turritellidæ, Mitridæ and others too numerous, too innumerable to mention. You stand stupefied before the vital ardour of the days of old, which was able to supply such a pile of relics in a mere nook of earth.
The necropolis of shells tells us, besides, that time, that patient renewer of the order of things, has mown down not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays, the neighbouring sea, the Mediterranean, has almost nothing identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of similarity between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the tropical seas. The climate, therefore, has become colder; the sun is slowly becoming extinguished; the species are dying out. Thus speak the numismatics of the stones on my window-ledge.
Without leaving my field of observation, so modest, so limited and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and, this time, on the subject of the insect. The country round Apt abounds in a strange rock that breaks off in thin plates, similar to sheets of whitish cardboard. It burns with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell; and it was deposited at the bottom of great lakes haunted by [[178]]crocodiles and giant tortoises. Those lakes no human eye has ever seen. Their basins have been replaced by the ridges of the hills; their muds, peacefully deposited in thin courses, have become mighty banks of rock.
Let us break off a slab and subdivide it into sheets with the point of a knife, a work as easy as separating the superposed layers of a piece of paste- or mill-board. In so doing, we are examining a volume taken from the library of the mountains, we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to the Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams; nay, better: realities converted into pictures.
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 [[179]]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. [[180]]
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, Rhynchophora, 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 [[181]]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. [[182]]
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 four-square; 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. [[183]]
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. [[184]]
[1] The Vocontii inhabited the Viennaise, between the Allobroges on the north, the Caturiges and the estates of King Cottius on the east, the Cavares on the west, and the Memini and Vulgientes on the south. Vasio (Vocontia), now Vaison, was their capital.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] From Massalia, the ancient name of Marseilles, of which Phocæa, in Asia Minor, was the mother city.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[3] Nemansus, the Latin name of Nîmes.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
CHAPTER XIV
LEAF-ROLLERS
The attainments of the Curculionid mother are, generally speaking, limited to inserting her eggs at places where the grubs will find suitable nourishment and occasionally varying the diet with a botanical judgment of marvellous certainty. She displays little or no industry. The niceties of the feeding-bottle or the baby-linen do not concern her. To this rough conception of the duties of maternity, I know but one exception, the attribute of certain Weevils, who, in order to endow their young with an alimentary preserve, possess the art of rolling a leaf, which serves as board and lodging in one.
Among these manufacturers of vegetable sausages, the most skilful is the Poplar Weevil (Rhynchites Populi, Lin.), who is modest in proportions, but resplendent in attire. Her back is clad in gleaming gold and copper; her back is indigo blue. Would you see her at work, you need but visit the lower twigs of the common black poplar, at the edge of the meadows, about the end of May.
Whereas, up at the top, the fond spring breezes shake the majestic green distaff and set the leaves quivering on their flattened stalks, down below, in a zone of calmer air, the tender shoots of the year remain quiescent. Here, especially, far from the wind-tossed heights opposed to [[185]]labour, the Rhynchites works. And, as the workshop is just at a man’s height, nothing is more easy than to observe the roller’s actions.
Easy, yes, but distressing, under a blazing sun, if one would follow the insect in all the detail of its methods and the progress of its work. Moreover, this involves a great deal of walking, which takes up time; and, again, it is not favourable to precise observations, which require an indefinite amount of leisure and assiduous visits at all hours of the day. It would, therefore, be greatly preferable to study the animal comfortably at home; but it is above all things necessary that she should lend herself to this plan.
The Rhynchites fulfils the condition excellently well. She is a peaceable enthusiast and works on my table with the same zest as in her poplar-tree. A few tender shoots, planted in fresh sand, under a woven-wire cover, and renewed as soon as they begin to fade, take the place of the tree in my study. The Weevil, not in the least intimidated, devotes herself to her industry even under the lens of my magnifying-glass and supplies me with as many scrolls as I could wish for.
Let us watch her at work. She picks the leaf which she proposes to roll from the young shoots sprouting in sheaves at the base of the trunk, but picks it not among the lower leaves, which are already the correct green and of a firm texture, nor yet among the terminal leaves, which are in a fair way of growing. Above, they are too young, not wide enough; below, they are too old, too tough, too hard to manage.
The leaf selected belongs to the intermediate rows. As yet of a doubtful green, in which yellow predominates, soft and glossy with varnish, it has, or has very nearly, [[186]]the final dimensions. Its denticulations swell into delicate glandular pads, whence oozes a little of the viscous matter that tars the buds at the moment when their bracts become disjoined.
A word now on the equipment in respect of tools. The legs are supplied with double claws shaped like the meat-hooks of a steel-yard. The lower side of the tarsi carries a thick tuft of white bristles. Thus shod, the insect clambers very nimbly up the most slippery vertical walls; it can stand and run like a fly, with its back downwards, on the ceiling of a glass bell. This characteristic alone is enough to suggest the subtle sense of equilibrium which the Weevil’s work will demand.
The curved and powerful beak or rostrum, without being exaggerated in size, spreads at the tip into a spatula ending in a pair of fine, shear-like mandibles. It makes an excellent bodkin, which plays the first or leading part in the whole work. The leaf, in fact, cannot be rolled in its actual condition. It is a live blade which, owing to the afflux of the sap and the tonicity of the tissues, would resume its flat formation in proportion as the insect endeavoured to curve it. The dwarf insect has not the strength to master a piece of these dimensions, to roll it up so long as it retains the elasticity of life. This is evident to our eyes; it is evident also to the eyes of the Weevil.
How is she to obtain the degree of inert suppleness required in the circumstances? We ourselves would say:
“We must pluck the leaf, let it fall to the earth, and manipulate it on the ground when it is rightly withered.” [[187]]
The Curculionid is cleverer than we at this sort of business and does not share our opinion. What she says to herself is:
“On the ground, amid the obstruction of the grass, my labours would be impracticable. I want elbow-room; I want the thing to hang in the air, where there are no obstacles of any kind. And there is a more serious consideration: my grub would refuse a rank, dried-up sausage; it insists on food that retains a certain freshness. The scroll which I intend for its consumption must be not a dead leaf, but an impaired leaf, not altogether deprived of the juices with which the tree supplies it. I must wean my joint, but not kill it outright, so that the dying leaf may remain in its place for the few days during which the extreme youth of the worm lasts.”
The mother, therefore, having made her selection, takes up her stand on the stalk of the leaf and there patiently drives in her rostrum, turning it with a persistency that denotes the great importance of this thrust of the bodkin. A little wound opens, a fairly deep wound, which soon becomes a point of mortification.
It is done: the sap-conduits are cut and allow only a scanty proportion to ooze through to the edge. At the injured point, the leaf gives way under the weight; it bends vertically, withers a little and soon acquires the requisite flexibility. The moment has come to work it.
That bodkin-thrust represents, although much less scientifically, the prick of the hunting Hymenopteron’s sting. The latter wants for her offspring a prey now dead, now paralyzed; she knows, with the thoroughness of a consummate anatomist, at what points it behoves her to insert the sting to obtain either sudden [[188]]death or merely a cessation of movement. The Rhynchites requires for her young a leaf rendered flexible ad hoc, half-alive, paralyzed in a fashion, a leaf that can easily be shaped into a scroll; she is wonderfully familiar with the little leaf-stalk, the petiole, in which the vessels that dispense the foliaceous energy are collected in a tiny bundle; and she inserts her drill there, there only and never any elsewhere. Thus, at one blow, without much trouble, she effects the ruin of the aqueduct. Where can the beaked insect have learnt her astute trade as a drier-up of wells?
The leaf of the poplar is an irregular rhombus, a spear-head whose sides widen into pointed pinions. The manufacture of the scroll begins with one of those two lateral corners, the right or left indifferently. Notwithstanding the hanging posture of the leaf, which makes the upper or lower surface equally easy of access, the insect never fails to take its position on the upper side. It has its reasons, dictated by the laws of mechanics. The upper surface of the piece, which is smoother and more flexible, has to form the inside of the scroll; the lower surface, which has greater elasticity because of its powerful veins, must occupy the outside. The statics of the small-brained Weevil agree with those of the scientists.
See her at work. She stands on the rolling-line, with three of her legs on the part already rolled and the three opposite on the part still free. Solidly fixed, on both sides, with her claws and tufts, she obtains a purchase with the legs on the one side, while making her effort with the legs on the other. The two halves of the machine alternate like motors, so that, at one time, the formed cylinder rolls over the free blade and, at another, the free blade moves and is laid upon the scroll already made. [[189]]
There is nothing regular, however, about these alternations, which depend upon circumstances known to the animal alone. Perhaps they merely afford a means of resting for a little while without stopping a work that does not allow of interruption. In the same way, our two hands mutually relieve each other by taking it in turns to carry the burden.
It is impossible to form an exact image of the difficulty overcome, without watching, for hours on end, the obstinate straining of the legs, which tremble with exhaustion and threaten to spoil everything if one of them let go at the wrong moment, or without seeing with what prudence the roller never releases one claw until the five others are firmly fixed. On the one side are three points of support, on the other three points of traction; and the six are shifted, one by one, little by little, without for a moment allowing their connected mechanical system to flag. A single instant of forgetfulness or weariness would cause the rebellious piece to unroll its scroll and escape from the manipulator’s grasp.
The work is accomplished, moreover, in an uncomfortable position. The leaf hangs very much on the slant or even vertically. Its surface is varnished, is smooth as glass. But the worker is shod accordingly. With her tufted soles, she scales the polished perpendicular; with her twelve meat-hooks, she tackles the slippery floor. Yet this fine set of tools does not rid the operation of all its difficulties. I find it no easy matter to follow the progress of the rolling with the magnifying-glass. The hands of a watch do not move more slowly. The insect stands for a long time, at the same point, with its claws firmly fixed; it is waiting for the leaf to be mastered and to cease resistance. Here, of course, there [[190]]is no gumming-process to catch hold and keep the fresh surfaces glued together. The stability depends purely upon the flexion acquired. And so it is not unusual for the elasticity of the piece to overcome the efforts of the worker and partly to unroll the more or less forward work. Stubbornly, with the same impassive slowness, the insect begins all over again, replaces the insubordinate piece. No, the Weevil is not one to allow herself to be upset by failure: she knows too well what patience and time will do.
The Rhynchites usually works backwards. When her line is finished, she is careful not to abandon the fold which she has just made and return to the starting-point to begin another. The part last folded is not yet fastened sufficiently; if left to itself too soon, it might easily rebel and flatten out again. The insect, therefore, persists at this extreme point, which is more exposed than the rest; and then, without letting go, makes her way backwards to the other end, still with patient slowness. In this way, an added firmness is imparted to the fold; and the next fold is prepared. At the end of the line there is a fresh prolonged halt, followed by a fresh backward motion. Even so does the husbandman’s plough-share alternate its work on the furrows.
Less frequently, when, no doubt, the leaf is found to be so limp as to entail no risk, the insect abandons the fold which it has just made, without going over it again in the opposite direction, and quickly scrambles to the starting-point to contrive a new one.
There we are at last. Coming and going from top to bottom and from bottom to top, the insect, by dint of stubborn dexterity, has rolled its leaf. It is now on the [[191]]extreme edge of the border, at the lateral corner opposite to that whereat the work commenced. This is the keystone upon which the stability of the rest depends. The Rhynchites redoubles her cares and patience. With the end of her rostrum, expanded spatulawise, she presses, at one point after the other, the edge to be fixed, even as the tailor presses the recalcitrant edges of a seam with his iron. For a long, a very long time, without moving, she pushes and pushes, awaiting the proper adhesion. Point by point, the whole of the corner welt is fastidiously sealed.
How is adhesion obtained? If only some thread or other were brought into play, one would readily look upon the rostrum as a sewing-machine planting its needle perpendicularly into the stuff. But the comparison is not allowable: there is no filament employed in the work. The explanation of the adherence lies elsewhere.
The leaf is young, we said; the fine pads of its denticulations are glands whence ooze liquid beads of glue. These drops of viscous matter are the gum, the sealing-wax. With the pressure of its beak, the insect makes it gush more plentifully from the glands. It then has only to hold the signet in position and wait for the impress to acquire consistency. Taken all round, it is our method of sealing a letter. If it hold ever so little, the leaf, losing its elasticity gradually as it withers, will soon cease to fly back and will of itself retain the scroll-form imposed upon it.
The work is done. It is a cigar of the diameter of a thick straw and about an inch long. It hangs perpendicularly from the end of the bruised and bent stalk. It has taken the whole of a day to make. After a short spell of rest, the mother tackles a second leaf and, working [[192]]by night, obtains another scroll. Two in twenty-four hours are as much as the most diligent can achieve.
Now what is the roller’s object? Would she go to the length of preparing preserves for her own use? Obviously not: no insect, where itself alone is concerned, devotes such care and patience to the preparation of food. It is only in view of the family that it hoards so industriously. The Rhynchites’ cigar forms the future dowry.
Let us unroll it. Here, between the layers of the scroll, is an egg; often there are two, three, or even four. They are oval, pale-yellow and like fine drops of amber. Their adhesion to the leaf is very slight; the least jerk loosens them. They are distributed without order, pushed more or less deeply in the thickness of the cigar and always isolated, singly. We find them in the centre of the scroll, almost at the corner where the rolling begins; we come upon them between the different layers and even near the edge which is sealed in glue with the signet of the rostrum.
Without interrupting her work on the scroll, without relaxing the tension of her claws, the mother has laid them between the lips of the fold in formation, as she felt them coming, one by one, duly matured, at the end of her oviduct. She procreates in the midst of her toil in the factory, between the wheels of the machine that would be thrown out of gear if she snatched a moment’s rest. Manufacture and laying go hand-in-hand. Short-lived, with but two or three weeks before her and an expensive family to settle, the Rhynchites would fear to waste her time in churching.
This is not all: on the same leaf, not far from the scroll that is being laboriously rolled, we almost always find the male. What is he doing there, the idler? Is he watching [[193]]the work as a mere inquisitive onlooker, who happened to be passing and stopped to see the machinery go round? Is he interested in the business? Does he ever feel inclined to lend a helping hand, in case of need?
One would say so. From time to time, I see him take his stand behind the manufacturer, in the groove of the fold, hang on to the cylinder and join for a little in the work. But this is done without zeal and awkwardly. Half a turn of the wheel, or hardly; and that’s enough for him. After all, it is not his business. He moves away, to the other end of the leaf; he waits, he looks on.
Let us give him credit for this attempt: paternal assistance in the settling of the family is very rare among insects; let us congratulate him on the help he gives, but not beyond measure: his was an interested aid. It is to him a means of declaring his flame and urging his merits.
And, in fact, after several refusals, notwithstanding the advances made by a brief collaboration at the scroll, the impatient one is accepted. Things happen in the work-yard. For ten minutes, the rolling is suspended; but the workwoman’s legs, stubbornly contracted, are careful not to let go: were their effort to cease, the scroll would unroll at once. There must be no interruption of work for this brief diversion, the animal’s only pleasure.
The stopping of the machine, which is always held tight so as to keep the recalcitrant roll in subjection, does not last long. The male withdraws to a slight distance, without quitting the leaf, and the task is resumed. Sooner or later, before the seals are put upon the work, a new visit is paid by the dawdler, who, under pretence of assisting, plants his claws for a moment into the rolling piece, plucks up courage and renews his exploits with the [[194]]same vigour as though nothing had yet happened. And this is repeated three or four times during the making of a single cigar, so much so that one asks one’s self whether the depositing of each germ does not demand the direct cooperation of the insatiable suitor.
According to entomological rules, once the fun is over, everything should relapse into calmness and each mother should to work at those cigars without further disturbance. In this case, the general law relents. I have never seen a scroll shaped without a male lurking in the neighbourhood; and, when I have had the patience to wait, I have always witnessed manifold pairings. These weddings repeated for each germ puzzle me. Where, relying on the books, I expected uniformity, I find uncertainty.
This is not an isolated case. I will mention a second and one that is even more striking. It is supplied by the Capricorn (Cerambyx Heros). I bring up a few couples in the volery, with sliced pears for food and oak billets wherein to lay the eggs. Pairing-time lasts during nearly the whole of July. For four weeks, the great horned one does nothing but mount his companion, who, gripped by her rider, wanders at will and, with the tip of her oviduct, selects the fissures in the bark best-suited to receive the eggs.
At long intervals, the Cerambyx alights and goes to refresh himself with a piece of pear. Then, suddenly, he stamps his feet as though he had gone mad; he returns with a frantic rush, clambers into the saddle and resumes his position, of which he makes free use at all hours of the night and day.
At the moment when an egg is being deposited, he keeps quiet: with his hairy tongue, he polishes the back of the egg-layer, which is a Capricorn’s way of caressing; [[195]]but, the instant after, he renews his attempts, which are usually crowned with success. There is no end to it!
The pairing continues in this manner for a month: it does not cease until the ovaries are exhausted. Then, mutually worn out, having nothing more to do on the trunk of the oak, husband and wife separate, languish for a few days and die.
What conclusion are we to draw from this extraordinary persistency in the Cerambyx, the Rhynchites and many others? Simply this: our truths are but provisional; assailed by the truths of to-morrow, they become entangled with so many contradictory facts that the last word of knowledge is doubt.
In the spring, while the leaves of the poplar are being worked into scrolls, another Rhynchites, she also gorgeously attired, makes cigars of the leaves of the vine. She is a little stouter, of a metallic gold-green turning to blue. Were she but larger, the splendid Vine Weevil would occupy a very respectable place among the gems of entomology.
To attract our eyes, she has something better than the brilliancy of her appearance: she has her industry, which makes her hated by the vine-grower, so jealous of his property. The peasant knows her; he even speaks of her by a special name, an honour rarely bestowed in the world of the smaller animals.
The rural vocabulary is rich where plants, but very poor where insects are concerned. A couple of dozen words, inextricably confused owing to their general character, represent the whole of entomological nomenclature in the Provençal idiom, which becomes so expressive and so fertile the moment it has to do with any sort of vegetation, sometimes even with a poor blade of [[196]]grass which one would believe known to the botanist alone.
The man of the soil is interested first and foremost in the plant, the great foster-mother; the rest leaves him indifferent. Magnificent adornment, curious habits, marvels of instinct: all these say nothing to him. But to touch his vine, to eat grass that doesn’t belong to one: what a heinous crime! Quick, give the malefactor a nickname, to serve as a penal collar!
This time, the Provençal peasant has gone out of his way to invent a special word: he calls the cigar-roller the Bécaru. Here the scientific expression and the rural expression agree fully. Rhynchites and Bécaru are exact equivalents: each refers to the insect’s long beak.
The Vine Weevil adopts the same method in her work as her cousin of the poplar. The leaf is first pricked with the rostrum at a spot in the stalk, which provokes a stoppage of the sap and flexibility in the withered blade. The rolling begins at the corner of one of the lower lobes, with the smooth, green upper surface within and the cottony strongly-veined lower surface without.
But the great width of the leaf and its deep indentations hardly ever allow of regular work from one end to the other. Abrupt folds occur instead and repeatedly alter the direction of the rolling, leaving now the green and now the cottony surface on the outside, without any appreciable order or arrangement, as though by chance. The poplar-leaf, with its simple form and its moderate size, gives a neat scroll; the vine-leaf, with its cumbersome girth and its complicated outline, produces a shapeless cigar, an untidy parcel. [[197]]