Shall we say that the cherry-tree, at first very economical with its fruit, became lavish by degrees in order thus to escape its multitudinous ravagers? Shall we say of the tree, as we said of the Mantis, that excessive destruction gradually induced excessive production? Who would dare to venture on such rash statements? Is it not perfectly obvious that the cherry-tree is one of those factories in which elements are wrought into organic matter, one of those laboratories in which the dead thing is changed into the thing fitted to live? No doubt, cherries ripen that they may be perpetuated; but these are the minority, the very small minority. If all seeds were to sprout and to develop fully, there would long ago have been no room on the earth for the cherry-tree alone. The vast majority of its fruits fulfil another function. They serve as food for a crowd of living creatures, who are not skilled as the plant is in the transcendental chemistry that turns the uneatable into the eatable.
Matter, in order to serve in the highest [[185]]manifestations of life, must undergo slow and most delicate elaboration. That elaboration begins in the workshop of the infinitely small, of the microbe, for instance, one of which, more powerful than the lightning’s might, combines oxygen and nitrogen and produces nitrates, the primary food of plants. It begins on the confines of nothingness, is improved in the vegetal, is yet further refined in the animal and step by step attains the substance of the brain.
How many hidden labourers, how many unknown manipulators worked perhaps for centuries, first at getting the rough ore and then at the refining of that grey matter which becomes the brain, the most marvellous of the implements of the mind, even if it were capable only of making us say:
“Two and two are four!”
The rocket, when rising, reserves for the culminating point of its ascent the dazzling fountain of its many-coloured lights. Then all is dark again. Its smoke, its gases, its oxides will, in the long run, be able to reconstitute other explosives by vegetable processes. Even so does matter act in its metamorphoses. From stage to stage, from one delicate refinement to another yet more delicate, [[186]]it succeeds in attaining heights where the splendours of the intellect shine forth through its agency; then, shattered by the effort, it relapses into the nameless thing whence it started, into scattered molecules which are the common origin of living things.
At the head of the assemblers of organic matter stands the plant, the animal’s senior. Directly or indirectly, it is to-day, as it was in the geological period, the chief purveyor to beings more generously endowed with life. In the laboratory of its cell the food of the universe at least gets its first rough preparation. Comes the animal, which corrects the preparation, improves it and transmits it to others of a higher order. Cropped grass becomes mutton; and mutton becomes human flesh or Wolf-flesh, according to the consumer.
Among those elaborators of nourishing atoms which do not create organic matter out of any- and everything, starting with the mineral, as the plant does, the most prolific are the fishes, the first-born of vertebrate animals. Ask the Cod what she does with her millions of eggs. Her answer will be that of the beech with its myriads of nuts, or the oak with its myriads of acorns. She [[187]]is immensely fruitful in order to feed an immense number of the hungry. She is continuing the work which her predecessors performed in remote ages, when nature, not as yet rich in organic matter, hastened to increase her reserves of life by bestowing prodigious exuberance upon her primeval workers.
The Mantis, like the fish, dates back to those distant epochs. Her strange shape and her uncouth habits have told us so. The richness of her ovaries confirms it. She retains in her entrails a feeble relic of the procreative fury that prevailed in olden times under the dank shade of the arborescent ferns; she contributes, in a very humble but none the less real measure, to the sublime alchemy of living things.
Let us look closely at her work. The grass grows thick and green, drawing its nourishment from the earth. The Locust crops it. The Mantis makes a meal of the Locust and swells out with eggs, which are laid, in three batches, to the number of a thousand. When they hatch, up comes the Ant and levies an enormous tribute on the brood. We appear to be retroceding. In vastness of bulk, yes; in refinement of instinct, [[188]]certainly not. In this respect how far superior is the Ant to the Mantis! Besides, the cycle of possible happenings is not closed.
Young Ants still contained in their cocoon—popularly known as Ants’-eggs—form the food on which the Pheasant’s brood is reared. These are domestic poultry just as much as the Pullet and the Capon, but their keep makes greater demands on the owner’s care and purse. When it grows big, this poultry is let loose in the woods; and people calling themselves civilized take the greatest pleasure in bringing down with their guns the poor creatures which have lost the instinct of self-preservation in the pheasantries, or, to speak plainly, in the poultry-yard. You cut the throat of the Chicken required for roasting; you shoot, with all the parade of sport, that other Chicken, the Pheasant. I fail to understand those insensate massacres.