At any rate this curious little creature, the small Cetonia, reduced to one-fourth of the regulation size, repeats what the Sacred Beetle but now taught us in a less conclusive [[253]]fashion, that, among the insects and very likely elsewhere, dwarfishness is the result of incomplete nutrition and not in any way the effect of predisposition.
Let us suppose an impossible case, or at least one extremely difficult to realize; let us imagine that, having obtained by starvation a few couples of Cetoniæ, we were able to keep them alive under favourable conditions. Would they found a family? And what would their offspring be like? The insect, in all probability, would not reply to our question, even though entreated by long perseverance; but the plant answers us readily.
On the paths in my two acres of pebbles, at spots where a little moisture lingers, there grows in April a familiar plant, the whitlow grass (Draba verna, Lin.). There is but little nourishment in this ungrateful trodden soil, hard with gravel, and the whitlow grass may be regarded as the equivalent of my famished Cetoniæ. From a flat pattern of sickly leaves rises a single stem, no thicker than a hair, barely an inch in height and with few ramifications or none, which nevertheless ripens its silicles, often reduced to one alone. Here, in short, I have a little garden of dwarf plants, the children of dearth. [[254]]My experiments in starvation were far from obtaining such results with the Sacred Beetle and the Cetonia.
I collect the seeds from the heads of the sickliest of these plants and sow them in good soil. Next spring, the dwarfishness disappears at once; the direct descendants of the abortive plants produce ample radiating patterns, multiple stalks reaching to a height of four inches or more and numerous ramifications, rich in silicles. The normal condition has returned.
If they had had enough energy to procreate their species, my dwarf insects, resulting from my artifices or from a casual concourse of enfeebling circumstances, would do as much. They would repeat what the whitlow grass has told us: that dwarfishness is an accident which heredity does not hand down, any more than it hands down knock-knees, or bow-legs, or the hunchback’s hump or the stump of the one-armed cripple. [[255]]
[1] .468 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] .702 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]