“Out of the material amassed by the wood-gnawer’s voracious appetite there is created an entirely new being. The flesh, at first nearly fluid, slowly acquires consistency; the skin hardens, assumes a chestnut hue, takes on the firmness of horn; in fact, when the warm season returns again the insect wakes up from that deep sleep, not of death, but nevertheless very much like it. The creature moves, tears apart the swathing bands under which its rebirth has taken place, strips off these wrappings, and here at last we have the insect in its full perfection. Behold the stag-beetle! “It comes out from its native oak, spreads its wings in flight under cover of the foliage, and settles down, now on this tree, now on that, in the rays of the sun. The freedom of the open air and the enjoyment of the light of day constitute its supreme felicity for which it has been preparing during the three or four years of constant toil in the dark galleries of an old oak. “Thenceforth it grows no larger. Just as it was on emerging from its cell, so it will remain to the end, without the least increase either in weight or in bulk. Thus it leads a very staid existence. In its grub state the famished creature gnawed wood night and day; its life was a perpetual digestion. Now, on the contrary, all that it needs in the way of sustenance is an occasional sip of the sweetened sap oozing from the bark of the tree. “But its days of idle delight are numbered; it has scarcely a couple of months to spend joyously among the oak trees. Then it lays its eggs, one by one, in the crevices of tree-trunks, to propagate its kind; and, that done, it very soon dies. It has played its part. From those eggs will come forth worms which will patiently work their way into the wood, hollow out galleries there in their turn, and begin all over again the very sort of existence led by their fore-fathers. “The greater number of insects have the same life-history as the stag-beetle: they pass through different stages before taking on their final form. All without exception, the smallest as well as the largest, come from eggs deposited by the mother in chosen places where the needed nourishment, so variable in different species, is easy to find. “From the egg emerges, not the finished insect with all its distinctive traits, but a provisional creature bearing, very often, no resemblance to the parent or to the matured offspring of that parent. This initial form we called a worm in speaking of the stag-beetle, and the name is in that instance appropriate; but in a multitude of cases it would be incorrect, having no agreement with the creature’s appearance. We then call it a larva.