The tiny creature, capable at first of movement, endowed with legs and antennæ, wandered for some time under cover of the lichen; then, before it became inert, it settled down on a suitable spot. There it turned its shrivelled skin, now an amber-coloured pellicle, into a mummy’s sarcophagus in which the organism makes ready for a new life. When the time comes, we shall discover the origin of this curious object, which was an animal and now deserves the name of egg.
What my own familiar terebinth has shown me in the enclosure, I ought to see repeated in the open country. Sure enough, I do see it; but this time it is not under lichens, for the bark of the tree is most often bare. There is no lack of other shelter. Some twigs of terebinth have been cut by the clumsy bill-hooks of the brushwood-gleaners, leaving a ragged section. The wood is split into deep fissures; the loose bark comes away in tatters. Once dry, these ruins are a mine of wealth.
In the narrowest crevices, in the cracks of [[248]]the wood and under the splintered bark, there are great numbers of the atoms that interest me so greatly. To judge by their colour there are at least two kinds. Some are red; the others are black. These latter were scarce under the lichens on my terebinth; here they predominate largely. I collect some of both kinds. And now we must have patience. I have hopes that the answer to the riddle will be found.
Mid-April comes and the little glass tubes in which I store my animal seeds are full of life. The black germs are the first to hatch; a fortnight later the red ones follow suit. The epidermic boxes undergo a process of self-mutilation, the front part falling off and leaving a gaping void, without other change of form. A minute animal comes out of them, a black speck in which the lens recognizes a very shapely little Louse, bearing the regulation sucker pressed against its thorax. My first thoughts were correct: the puzzling little red and black bodies found under the lichens and in the cracks of dead wood were really Louse-seeds.
And these seeds, judging by their husks, endowed with a head and legs, are little insects, [[249]]first active and then inert and converted into germs. The original, almost integral substance is reborn in another shape. The little creature’s skin has provided the shell, the segmented box, a jet-black or amber-yellow pellicule; the rest is concentrated into an egg.
The time has not come to observe the singular creature’s origin and behaviour; chronological order forbids. Let us return to the vermin issuing from these germs. They are tiny, tiny little black Lice, with flat abdomens, plainly segmented and as it were granular. Assiduous observation through the lens shows them to be dusted with a touch of blue-grey powder like the bloom on a plum. Trotting with little steps about their spacious prison, the glass tube, they seem uneasy. What do they want? What are they looking for? No doubt, a camping-ground on the friendly tree.
I come to their assistance; I place in the tube a twig of terebinth whose buds are beginning to open at the top of their scaly covering. This is the thing they wanted. They climb up the twig, establish themselves in the velvet that clothes the tips of the [[250]]buds, and there they settle, calm and satisfied.
Direct observations made on the terebinth are accompanied, pari passu, by laboratory experiments. The little black Lice, rare on the 15th of April, are numerous ten days later. On the tip of a single bud I count over twenty of them; and most of the buds are colonized, or at least those that are largest and farthest from the ground. The occupants remain hidden in the scanty down of the nascent follicles whose tips are barely emerging.
After a sojourn of some days, when the leaves begin to appear, each insect makes for itself a private dwelling. It exploits, with its sucker, a leaflet whose tip turns purple, swells up and curls over, and, bringing its edges together, forms a flat pocket with an irregular opening. Each of these pockets, about the size of a grain of hemp-seed, is a tent in which a black Plant-louse takes up her residence: one only, never more.
What will the little Louse do in her isolated retreat? Feed, and, above all, multiply. If one is to become legion a few months hence, matters brook no delay. [[251]]Here, then, there is no father, a mere superfluity and waste of time. So many Lice, so many mothers; no more is needed. Nor is there any laying, for the egg would take too long to develop. Nothing short of direct procreation, unfettered by any preliminaries, is acceptable to the Louse’s ardour. The young are born alive and like their mother, except in point of size.