5
But I see that our heroes are infinitely too numerous and that we must not linger over our descriptions. We may at most, in enumerating the more important and familiar, bestow on each of them a hurried epithet, in the manner of old Homer. Shall I mention, for instance, the Leucospis, a parasite of the Mason-bee, who, to slay his brothers and sisters in their cradle, arms himself with a horn helmet and a barbed breastplate, which he doffs immediately after the extermination, the safeguard of a hideous right of primogeniture? Shall I tell of the marvellous anatomical knowledge of the Tachytes, of the Cerceris, of the Ammophila, of the Languedocian Sphex and many other wasps, who, according as they wish to paralyse or to kill their prey or their adversary, know exactly, without ever blundering, which nerve-centres to strike with their sting or their mandibles? Shall I speak of the art of the Eumenes, who transforms her stronghold into a complete museum adorned with shells and with grains of translucent quartz; of the magnificent metamorphosis of the Grey Locust; of the musical instrument owned by the Cricket, whose bow numbers one hundred and fifty triangular prisms that set in motion simultaneously the four dulcimers of the wing-case? Shall I sing the fairy-like birth of the nymph of the Onthophagus, a transparent monster, with a bull’s snout, that seems carved out of a block of crystal? Would you behold the Flesh-fly, the common Blue-bottle, daughter of the maggot, as she issues from the earth? Listen to our author:
“She disjoints her head into two movable halves, which, each distended with its great red eye, by turns separate and reunite. In the intervening space, a large, glassy hernia rises and disappears, disappears and rises. When the two halves move asunder, with one eye forced back to the right and the other to the left, it is as though the insect were splitting its brain-pan in order to expel the contents. Then the hernia rises, blunt at the end and swollen into a great knob. Next, the forehead closes and the hernia retreats, leaving visible only a kind of shapeless muzzle. In short, a frontal pouch, with deep pulsations, momentarily renewed, becomes the instrument of deliverance, the pestle wherewith the newly-hatched Dipteron bruises the sand and causes it to crumble. Gradually, the legs push the rubbish back and the insect advances so much towards the surface.”