To fulfil its hygienic mission the insect arrives in due season, and multiplies its legions; "there are twenty thousand eggs in the flanks of the house fly; immediately they are hatched these twenty thousand maggots set to work, so that Linnaeus has said that three flies would suffice to devour the body of a horse or a lion." Feeding only upon wheat, a single weevil, the Calendar beetle, produces ten thousand eggs, whence issue as many larvae, each of them devouring its grain. In all species the number of births is at first exaggerated, for all, the obscure, the nameless, the most destructive, our pests as well as our most precious helpers, have their utility and their part to play in the general scheme of life, a raison d'être in the eternal renewal of things, which is without reference to the vexatious or beneficent quality of their behaviour to us. Each has its rank assigned, each has its task, to one the flower, to another the roots, to a third the leaves; the vine has its caterpillars, its beetles, its butterflies; the clover, its moths and mites. (10/6.) Man sees himself forced to submit to them, and spends himself in vain efforts to carry on an often useless campaign. Nothing seems to affect them, neither drought, nor rain, nor even the severest cold; and the eggs and larvae, organizations apparently delicate in the extreme, are often more tenacious of life than the adults. Fabre has proved this: let the temperature suddenly fall twenty degrees: the eggs of Geotrupes and the larvae of the cockchafer or the rose-beetle endure such vicissitudes of temperature with impunity; contracted and stiffened into little masses of ice, but not destroyed, they revive in spring no less than the eel fry, the rotifers, or the tardigrades. One can scarcely believe that life still persists in a state of suspense only in these little frozen creatures, whose organization is already so complicated. Then, of a sudden, the ravagers disappear; more often than not none knows how or why; deliverance is at hand. What indeed would become of the world were nothing to moderate such fecundity? Again, each species has its trials which appear in time to moderate its surplusage, and Fabre expounds for us, with a stern philosophy, the terrible devices by which this repression is effected. Each has its appointed enemy, which lives upon it or its offspring, and which in turn becomes the prey of some smaller creature. The gentle itself, "the king of the dead," has its parasites. While it swims in the deliquescence of putrefying flesh a minute Chalcidian perforates its skin with an imperceptible wound, and introduces its terrible eggs, whence in the future will issue larvae which to-morrow will devour the devourers of to-day.