Wasps are pillaging the centauries. On the blossoms of the camomile the larvae of the Meloë are waiting for the Anthophorae to carry them off to their cells, while around them roam the Cicindelae, their green bodies "spotted with points of amaranth." At the bottom of the walls "the chilly Psyche creeps slowly along under her cloak of tiny twigs." In the dead bough of a lilac-tree the dark-hued Xylocopa, the wood-boring bee, is busy tunnelling her gallery. In the shade of the rushes the Praying Mantis, rustling the floating robe of her long tender green wings, "gazes alertly, on the watch, her arms folded on her breast, her appearance that of one praying," and paralyses the great grey locust, nailed to its place by fear. Nothing here is insignificant; what the world would smile at or deride will provide the sage with food for thought and reflection. "Nothing is trivial in the majestic problem of nature; our laboratory acquaria are of less value than the imprint which the shoe of a mule has left in the clay, when the rain has filled the primitive basin, and life has peopled it with marvels"; and the least fact offered us by chance on the most thoroughly beaten track may possibly open prospects as vast as all the starry sky. Tell yourself that everything in nature is a symbol of something like a specimen of an abstruse cryptogram, all the characters of which conceal some meaning. But when we have succeeded in deciphering these living texts, and have grasped the allusion; when, beside the symbol, we have succeeded in finding the commentary, then the most desolate corner of the earth appears to the solitary seeker as a gallery full of the masterpieces of an unsuspected art. Fabre puts into our hands the golden key which opens the doors of this marvellous museum. Let us consider the terebinth louse; it is just a little yellow mite; but is it nothing else? Its genealogical history teaches us "by what amazing essays of passion and variety the universal law which rules the transmission of life is evolved. Here is neither father nor eggs; all these mites are mothers; and the young are born living, just like their mothers." To this end "almost the whole of the maternal substance is disintegrated and renewed and conglobated to form the ovarium...the whole creature has become an egg, which has, for its shell, the dry skin of the tiny creature, and the microscope will show a whole world in formation...a nebulosity as of white of egg, in which fresh centres of life are forming, as the suns are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens." (7/1.)