Here at last is the Decticus in his youthful shape, quite pale still, but darker the next day and a regular blackamoor compared with the adult. As a prelude to the ivory face of a riper age, he sports a narrow white stripe under his hinder thighs.
Little Decticus, hatched before my eyes, life opens for you very harshly! Many of your kindred must die of exhaustion before attaining their freedom. In my tubes I see numbers who, stopped by a grain of sand, succumb half-way and become furred with a sort of silky mildew. The mouldy part soon absorbs their poor little remains. When performed without my assistance, the coming to the light of day must be attended with even greater dangers. The usual soil is coarse and baked by the sun. Without a fall of rain, how do they manage, these immured ones?
More fortunate in my tubes with their sifted and wetted mould, here you are outside, you little white-striped nigger; you bite at the lettuce-leaf which I have given [[245]]you; you leap about gaily in the cage where I have housed you. It would be easy to rear you, I can see, but it would not give me much fresh information. Let us then part company. I restore you to liberty. In return for what you have taught me, I bestow upon you the grass and the Locusts in the garden.
Thanks to you, I know that Grasshoppers, in order to leave the ground in which the eggs are laid, possess a provisional shape, a primary larval stage, which keeps those too cumbrous parts, the long legs and antennæ, swathed in a common sheath; I know that this sort of mummy, fit only to lengthen and shorten itself a little, has for an organ of locomotion a hernia in the neck, a throbbing blister, an original piece of mechanism which I have never seen used elsewhere as an aid to progression.[5] [[246]]
[1] The highest mountain (6,270 feet) in the neighbourhood of Sérignan. Cf. The Hunting Wasps: chap. xi.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[2] M. Bellot, forest-ranger of Beaumont (Vaucluse).—Author’s Note. [↑]
[3] .195 to .234 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[4] .039 inch.—Translator’s Note. [↑]
[5] This essay was written prior to that on the Grey Flesh-flies, who employ a similar method. Cf. The Life of the Fly: chap. x.—Translator’s Note. [↑]