The implement of the Megachile, the rose-fly, is by no means appropriate to its industry; "yet the perfectly circular fragments of leaves have the precise perfection of form that a punch would give." The Xylocopa, in order to pierce wood and to bore its galleries in an old rafter, employs "the same utensils which in others are transformed into picks and mattocks to attack clay and gravel, and it is only a predisposition of talent that holds each worker to his speciality." Moreover, have not the superior animals the same senses and the same structure, yet what inequality there is among them, in the matter of aptitudes and degrees of intelligence! Habits are no more determined by anatomical peculiarities than are aptitudes or industries. The two Goat-moth caterpillars, of similar structure, have entirely different stomachic aptitudes; "the exclusive portion of the one is the oak and of the other the hawthorn or the cherry-laurel." "Whence does the Mantis derive its excessive hunger, its pugnacity, its cannibalism, and the Empusa its sobriety, its peaceableness, when their almost identical organization would seem to indicate an identity of needs, instincts, and habits?" In the same way the black scorpion appears to present none of the interesting peculiarities which we observe in the habits of its congener, the white scorpion of Languedoc. (8/22.) Structure, therefore, tells us nothing of aptitude; the organ does not explain its function. Let the specialists hypnotize themselves over their lenses and microscopes; they may accumulate at leisure masses of details relating to this or that family or genus or individual; they may undertake the most subtle inquiries, may write thousands and thousands of pages in order to detail a few slight variations, without even succeeding in exhausting the matter: they will not even have seen what is most wonderful. When the little insect has for the last time cleaned its claws, the secret of the little mind has fled for ever, with all the feelings that animated it and gave it life. That which is crystallized in death cannot explain what was life. This is the thought which the Provençal singer, with that intuition which is the privilege of genius, has expressed in these melodious lines: "Oh! pau de sèn qu'emé l'escaupre Furnant la mort, creson de saupre, La vertu de l'abiho e lou secrèt doù méu." (O men of little sense, who seek, Scalpel in hand, to make Death tell The virtue of the bee, the secret of her cell!) (8/23.) CHAPTER 9. EVOLUTION OR "TRANSFORMISM." "How did a miserable grub acquire its marvellous knowledge? Are its habits, its aptitudes, and its industries the integration of the infinitely little, acquired by successive experiences on the limitless path of time?" It is in these words that Fabre presents the problem of evolution.