Even the carcase of a Mastodon, defying time in its sandy bed, fills us with amazement; a Gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.
Certainly, the Mosquito, borne along by the floods, did not come from far away. Before he arrived, some turbulent streamlet must have reduced him to the nothingness to which he was already so near. Slain by the joys of a morning—[[13]]a long life for a Gnat—he fell from the top of his reed, was straightway drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.
Who are these others, these dumpy creatures, with hard, convex wing-cases, which next to the Flies are the most numerous. Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us beyond dispute. They are proboscidian Beetles, Rhynchophoræ, or, in simpler terms, Weevils. There are small ones, middling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.
Their position on the limestone slab is not as correct as the Mosquito’s. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum, is now hidden under the breast, now projects forward. Some display it in profile; others—more frequent these—stretch it to one side, as the result of a twisted neck. These contorted insects, with their dislocated members, did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Flies. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants by the shore, the others, the majority, come from the surrounding parts, carried by the rain-water, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as twigs and stones. A suit of armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way to some extent; and the muddy winding-sheet received the drowned Beetles as the ravages of the journey left them.
These strangers, coming perhaps from afar, [[14]]supply us with valuable information. They tell us that, if the shores of the gulf had the Mosquito as chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil.
Apart from the snout-bearing family, the pages of my Apt rock show me scarcely anything else, especially in the order of the Beetles. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus,[16] the Dung-beetle,[17] the Capricorn,[18] whom the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvest, 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,[19] the Gyrinus,[20] the Dytiscus,[21] all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had every chance of being handed down to us as mummies between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they used to live [[15]]in the lake, whose mud would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more effectually than the little fishes and more especially the Fly. Well, of these aquatic Beetles there is no trace either.
Where were they, where were those who are missing from the geological reliquary? Where were the inhabitants of the thickets, of the green-swards, of the worm-eaten tree-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, if I may credit the modest records which I am able to consult, must therefore be the oldest of the Beetles.
In the beginning, life fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the saurian, it revelled at first in monsters from fifteen to twenty yards long. It placed horns upon their noses and above their eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, and hollowed their necks into spiny pouches wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though with no 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 reptile’s pointed teeth and suspended from [[16]]its rump a long, feather-clad tail. These indeterminate and revoltingly hideous creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove.