In the same way the black scorpion appears to present none of the interesting peculiarities which we observe in the habits of its congener, the white scorpion of Languedoc. [(8/22.)]
Structure, therefore, tells us nothing of aptitude; the organ does not explain its function. Let the specialists hypnotize themselves over their lenses and microscopes; they may accumulate at leisure masses of details relating to this or that family or genus or individual; they may undertake the most subtle inquiries, may write thousands and thousands of pages in order to detail a few slight variations, without even succeeding in exhausting the matter: they will not even have seen what is most wonderful.
When the little insect has for the last time cleaned its claws, the secret of the little mind has fled for ever, with all the feelings that animated it and gave it life. That which is crystallized in death cannot explain what was life. This is the thought which the Provençal singer, with that intuition which is the privilege of genius, has expressed in these melodious lines:
"Oh! pau de sèn qu'emé l'escaupre
Furnant la mort, creson de saupre,
La vertu de l'abiho e lou secrèt doù méu."
(O men of little sense, who seek,
Scalpel in hand, to make Death tell
The virtue of the bee, the secret of her cell!) [(8/23.)]
[CHAPTER 9. EVOLUTION OR "TRANSFORMISM."]
"How did a miserable grub acquire its marvellous knowledge? Are its habits, its aptitudes, and its industries the integration of the infinitely little, acquired by successive experiences on the limitless path of time?"
It is in these words that Fabre presents the problem of evolution.
Difficult though it may be to follow the sequence of forms which have endlessly succeeded and replaced one another on the face of the earth, since the beginning of the world, it is certain that all living creatures are closely related; and the magnificent and fertile hypothesis of evolution, which seeks to explain how extant forms are derived from extinct, has the immense advantage of giving a plausible reason for the majority of the facts which at least cease to be completely unintelligible.
Otherwise we can certainly never imagine how so many instincts, and these so complex and perfect, could have issued suddenly "from the urn of hazard."