Then chemistry will step in, with its legion of cunning reagents. It will turn everything into nutritious matter, in a highly concentrated form, capable of being assimilated in its entirety and leaving hardly any foul residue. A loaf of bread will be a pill; a rumpsteak a drop of jelly. Of agricultural labour, the inferno of barbarian times, nothing will remain but a memory, of interest only to the historians. The last Sheep and the last Ox will figure, neatly stuffed, as curiosities in our museums, together with the Mammoth dug up from the Siberian ice-fields.
All that old lumber—herds and flocks, seeds, fruits and vegetables—is doomed to disappear some day. Progress demands it, we are told; and the chemist’s retort, which, in its presumptuous fashion, recognizes nothing as impossible, repeats the assertion.
This golden age of foodstuffs leaves me very incredulous. When it is a question of obtaining some new toxin, science displays alarming ingenuity. Our laboratory collections are veritable arsenals of poisons. When the object is to invent a still in which [[369]]potatoes shall be made to yield torrents of alcohol capable of turning us into a nation of sots, the resources of industry know no limits. But to procure by artificial means a single mouthful of really nourishing matter is a very different business. Never has any such product simmered in our retorts. The future, beyond a doubt, will do no better. Organized matter, the only true food, escapes the formulæ of the laboratory. Its chemist is life.
We shall do well therefore to preserve agriculture and our herds. Let us leave our nourishment to be prepared by the patient work of plants and animals, let us mistrust the brutal factory and keep our confidence for more delicate methods and, in particular, for the Locust’s stomach, which assists in the making of the Christmas Turkey. That stomach has culinary receipts which the chemist’s retort will always envy without succeeding in imitating them.
This picker-up of nutritive trifles, destined to support a crowd of paupers, possesses musical powers wherewith to express his joys. Consider a Locust at rest, blissfully digesting his meal and enjoying the sunshine. With sharp strokes of the bow, [[370]]three or four times repeated and spaced with pauses, he sings his ditty. He scrapes his sides with his great hind-legs, using now one, now the other, anon both at a time.
The result is very poor, so slight indeed that I am obliged to have recourse to little Paul’s ear in order to make sure that there is a sound at all. Such as it is, it resembles the creaking of the point of a needle pushed across a sheet of paper. There you have the whole song, so near akin to silence.
There is nothing more to be expected from so rudimentary an instrument. We have nothing here similar to what the Grasshopper clan have shown us: no toothed bow, no vibrating membrane stretched into a drum. Let us, for instance, take a look at the Italian Locust (Caloptenus italicus, Lin.), whose apparatus of sound is repeated in the other stridulating Acridians. His hinder thighs are keel-shaped above and below. Each surface, moreover, has two powerful longitudinal nervures. Between these main parts there is, in either case, a graduated row of smaller, chevron-shaped nervures; and the whole thing is as prominent and as plainly marked on this outer side as on the inner one. And what surprises me even [[371]]more than this similarity between the two surfaces is that all these nervures are smooth. Lastly, the lower edge of the wing-cases, the edge rubbed by the thighs which serve as a bow, also has nothing particular about it. We see, as indeed we do all over the wing-cases, nervures that are powerful but devoid of any rasping roughness or the least denticulation.
What can this artless attempt at a musical instrument produce? Just as much as a dry membrane will emit when you rub it. And for the sake of this trifle the insect lifts and lowers its thighs, in sharp jerks, and is satisfied with the result. It rubs its sides very much as we rub our hands together in sign of contentment, with no intention of making a sound. That is its own particular way of expressing its joy in life.
Examine it when the sky is partly obscured and the sun shines intermittently. There comes a rift in the clouds. Forthwith the thighs begin to scrape, increasing their activity as the sun grows hotter. The strains are very brief, but they are renewed so long as the sunshine continues. The sky becomes overcast. Then and there the song ceases, to be resumed with the next gleam of sunlight, [[372]]always in brief spasms. There is no mistaking it: here, in these fond lovers of the light, we have a mere expression of happiness. The Locust has his moments of gaiety when his crop is full and the sun benign.
Not all the Acridians indulge in this joyous rubbing. The Tryxalis (Truxalis nasuta, Lin.), who sports a pair of immensely elongated hind-legs, maintains a gloomy silence even under the most vigorous caresses of the sun. I have never seen him move his shanks like a bow; he seems unable to use them—so long are they—for anything but hopping.