What artist could ever engrave on rare metals or model in precious substances a more beautiful subject than the wonderful picture of the Tarantula offering, at the length of her extended limbs, her white sac of eggs to the sun; or the transparent nymph of the Onthophagus taurus, "as though carved from a block of crystal, with its wide snout and its enormous horns like those of the Aurochs"? (12/12.) What an undiscovered subject he might find in the nymph of the Ergatus (12/13.), with its almost incorporeal grace, as though made of "translucent ivory, like a communicant in her white veils, the arms crossed upon the breast; a living symbol of mystic resignation before the accomplishment of destiny"; or in the still more mysterious nymph of the Scarabaeus sacer, first of all "a mummy of translucent amber, maintained by its linen cerements in a hieratic pose; but soon upon this background of topaz, the head, the legs, and the thorax change to a sombre red, while the rest of the body remains white, and the nymph is slowly transfigured, assuming that majestic costume which combines the red of the cardinal's mantle with the whiteness of the sacerdotal alb." On the other hand, what Sims or Bateman ever imagined weirder caricature than the grotesque larva of the Oniticella, with its extravagant dorsal hump; or the fantastic and alarming silhouette of the Empusa, with its scaly belly raised crozierwise and mounted on four long stilts, its pointed face, turned-up moustaches, great prominent eyes, and a "stupendous mitre": the most grotesque, the most fantastic freaks that creation can ever have evolved? (12/14.) CHAPTER 13. THE EPIC OF ANIMAL LIFE. Although in his portraits and descriptions Fabre is simple and exact, and so full of natural geniality; although he can so handle his words as to render them "adequate" to reproduce the moving pictures of the tiny creatures he observes, his style touches a higher level, flashes with colour, and grows rich with imagery when he seeks to interpret the feelings which animate them: their loves, their battles, their cunning schemes, and the pursuit of their prey; all that vast drama which everywhere accompanies the travail of creation. It is here in particular that Fabre shows us what horizons, as yet almost unexplored, what profound and inexhaustible resources science is able to offer poetry. The breaking of egg or chrysalid is in itself a moving event; for to attain to the light is for all these creatures "a prodigious travail." The hour of spring has sounded. At the call of the field-cricket, the herald of the spring, the germs that slumber in nymph or chrysalis have broken through their spell. What haste and ingenuity are required to emerge from the natal darkness, to unwrap the swaddling-bands, to break the subterranean shells, to demolish the waxen bulkheads, to perforate the soil or to escape from prisons of silk!