These strangers, come perhaps from afar, supply us with precious information. They tell us that, whereas the banks of the lake had the Mosquito as the chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil.
Outside the snout-carrying family, the sheets of my Apt rock show me hardly anything more, especially in the order of the Coleoptera. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, the Dung-beetle, the Capricorn, which the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvests, 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, the Gyrinus, the Dytiscus, all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had a great chance of coming down to us mummified between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they lived in the lake, whose muds would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more perfectly than the little fishes and especially than the Dipteron. Well, of those aquatic Coleoptera there is no trace either.
Where were they, where were those missing from the geological reliquary? Where were they of the thickets, of the green-sward, of the worm-eaten 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, therefore, if I may credit the modest records which I am free to consult, is the oldest of the Coleoptera. [[182]]
Life, at the start, fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the Saurian, it revelled at first in monsters fifteen and twenty yards long. It placed horns on their noses and eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, hollowed their necks into spiny wallets, wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though not with 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 pointed teeth of the reptile and appended a long, feathered tail unto its rump. These undetermined and revoltingly ugly creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove.
All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot’s brain. The brute of antiquity is, first and foremost, an atrocious machine for snapping, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later.
The Weevil, in his fashion, to a certain extent, repeats these aberrations. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut four-square; elsewhere a crazy reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouthpiece, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on the sides, the antennæ, with their first joints set in a groove.
What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose? Where did the insect find the model? Nowhere. The Weevil is its inventor and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Coleopteron indulges in these buccal eccentricities. [[183]]
Observe, also, the smallness of the head, a bulb that hardly swells beyond the base of the snout. What can it have inside? A very poor nervous equipment, the sign of exceedingly limited instincts. Before seeing them at work, we make small account of these microcephali, in respect of intelligence; we class them among the obtuse, among creatures bereft of working capacity. These surmises will not be very largely upset.