The thick-set cooper has her merits, which I should like to elucidate more fully by watching her at work. What I have contrived to see in the open, in the actual workshop, amounts to little more than nothing. Many a time do I surprise the Weevil on her cask, motionless, with her snout against the staves. What is she doing [[150]]there? She is sleeping in the sunlight; she is waiting for the last layer of the work to acquire a firm hold under prolonged pressure. If I examine her too closely, she at once gathers her legs under her belly and lets herself fall.
Since my visits tell me hardly anything, I try to rear the insect in domesticity. The Attelabus lends herself very well to the attempt: she works under my bell-jars as zealously as on her oak. What I now learn deprives me of all hope of following the details of the leaf-rolling process: the Attelabus is one of those who work at night.
Late in the evening, about nine or ten o’clock, she gives the cuts of the scissors that slash the leaf; next morning the keg is finished. Seen by the uncertain light of a lamp and at untimely hours, hours rightly claimed by sleep, the worker’s delicate technique would escape me. We will give up the idea.
There is a reason for these nocturnal habits. I think I see what it is. The leaf of the oak, especially of the holm-oak, is much harder to bend than the leaf of the alder, the poplar or the vine. If rolled in the daytime, under the burning rays of the sun, it would add to the difficulties arising from indifferent flexibility those due to incipient dryness. On the other hand, when visited by the dew, in the coolness of the night, it will remain pliable; it will yield adequately to the efforts of the roller; and the barrel will [[151]]be ready when the sun comes, with its blazing heat, to steady the shape of the still moist fabric.
However different one from the other, the four leaf-rollers have shown us that the individual craft is not a matter of organic structure, that the tool does not determine the nature of the work. Whether endowed with a rostrum or a snout, whether long-legged or slow, slender or thickset, perforators or cutters-out, they all four achieve the same result, the cylinder that acts as a shelter and a larder for the grub.
They tell us that instinct has its origin elsewhere than in the organs. It goes farther back; it is inscribed in the primeval code of life. Far from being dependent on the tools, it commands them and is able to employ them as it finds them, with the same skill, for one task here and for another there.
The little cooper of the oak-tree has not finished with her revelations. Having observed her pretty frequently, I know how fastidious she is of the quality of her victuals. If they be dry, she refuses them absolutely, even though it means dying of starvation. She wants them tender, pickled in moisture, softened by incipient decay, even seasoned with a touch of mildew. I prepare them to her liking by keeping them in a jar on a bed of moist sand.
Thus treated, the grub hatched in June soon increases in size. Two months are enough to [[152]]turn it into a handsome orange-yellow larva, which, when its cell is broken open, suddenly, with the violence of a spring released, straightens its curved body and tosses about. Observe its slender form, much less stout than that of the other Weevils in general. This is the only instance in which lack of corpulence in the larva denotes an adult of an exceptional class. I shall say no more on the subject of the grub: its description would be of no particular interest.
The matter deserves looking into more closely. It is the end of September; we have been suffering from an extraordinarily hot and dry summer. The dog-days seem determined to last for ever. The forests are ablaze in the Ardèche, the Bordeaux and the Roussillon districts; whole villages have been burnt down on the slopes of the Alps; in front of my door, a careless passer-by, throwing away a match, sets fire to the neighbouring meadows. You cannot call it a summer: it is a conflagration.
What can the Attelabus be doing in such disastrous weather? She is thriving comfortably in my jars, which keep her victuals soft for her; but, at the foot of her oak, amid the undergrowth shrivelled as though by the breath of a furnace, on the calcined earth, what becomes of the poor thing? Let us go and see.