“These fishes lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly, swells came and asphyxiated them in their mud-thickened waves. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, they have passed through time, will pass through it indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.”
The same swells brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so [[179]]much so that the lacustrian deposit talks to us also of things on land. It is a general record of the life of the time.
Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves drawn in brown prints. The stone herbal vies in botanical accuracy with a normal herbal. It repeats what the shells had already told us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in former days; it no longer includes palm-trees, camphor-yielding laurels, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions.
Continue to turn the pages. We now come to the insects. The most frequent are the Diptera, of middling size, often very humble flies and gnats. The teeth of the great Squali astonished us by their soft polish amid the roughness of their chalky veinstone. What shall we say of these frail midges preserved intact in their marly shrine? The frail creature, which our fingers could not grasp without crushing it, lies undeformed beneath the weight of the mountains!
The six slender legs, which the least thing is enough to disjoint, here lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape and arrangement, in the attitude of the insect at rest. There is nothing lacking, not even the tiny double claws of the extremities. Here are the two wings, unfurled. The fine net-work of their nervures can be studied under the lens as clearly as in the Dipteron of the collections, stuck upon its pin. The antennary tufts have lost none of their subtle elegance; the belly gives us the number of the rings, edged with a row of atoms that were cilia. [[180]]
The carcase of a mastodont, defying time in its sandy bed, already astonishes us: a gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.
Certainly, the Mosquito, carried by the rising swells, did not come from far away. Before his arrival, the hurly-burly of a thread of water must have reduced him to that annihilation to which he was so near. He lived on the shores of the lake. Killed by the joys of a morning—the old age of gnats—he fell from the top of his reed, was forthwith drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.
Who are those others, those dumpy ones, with hard, convex elytra, the most numerous next to the Diptera? Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us plainly. They are proboscidian Coleoptera, Rhynchophora, or, in less hard terms, Weevils. There are small ones, middling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.
Their attitudes on the chalky slab are not as correct as those of the Mosquito. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum is at one time hidden under the chest, at another projects forward. Some show it in profile; others—more frequent these—stretch it to one side, as the result of a twist in the neck.
These dislocated, contorted insects did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Dipteron. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants on the banks, the others, the majority, come from the surrounding neighbourhood, brought by the rains, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as branches and stones. A stout armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way [[181]]to some extent; and the miry winding-sheet received the drowned Beetles as the disorder of the passage left them.