[7] Rose-chafers. Cf. More Hunting Wasps: chap. iv.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[8] ·585 by ·39 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
Chapter iii
THE BEAR LARINUS
I sally forth in the night, with a lantern, to spy out the land. Around me, a circle of faint light enables me to recognize the broad masses fairly well, but leaves the fine details unperceived. At a few paces’ distance, the modest illumination disperses, dies away. Farther off still, everything is pitch-dark. The lantern shows me—and but very indistinctly—just one of the innumerable pieces that compose the mosaic of the ground.
To see some more of them, I move on. Each time there is the same narrow circle, of doubtful visibility. By what laws are these points, inspected one by one, correlated in the general picture? The candle-end cannot tell me; I should need the light of the sun.
Science too proceeds by lantern-flashes; it explores nature’s inexhaustible mosaic piece by piece. Too often the wick lacks oil; the glass panes of the lantern may not be clean. No matter: his work is not in vain who first recognizes and shows to others one speck of the vast unknown.
However far our ray of light may penetrate, the illuminated circle is checked on every side by the [[44]]barrier of the darkness. Hemmed in by the unfathomable depths of the unknown, let us be satisfied if it be vouchsafed to us to enlarge by a span the narrow domain of the known. Seekers, all of us, tormented by the desire for knowledge, let us move our lantern from point to point: with the particles explored we shall perhaps be able to piece together a fragment of the picture.
To-day the shifting of the lantern’s rays leads us to the Bear Larinus (L. ursus, Fabr.), the exploiter of the carline thistles. We must not let this inappropriate name of Bear give us an unfavourable notion of the insect. It is due to the whim of a nomenclator who, having exhausted his vocabulary, baffled by the never-ending stream of things already named, uses the first word that comes to hand.