So far so good. But now tell me, if you please, why the larvae of the Oryctes and the Scarabaeus, living in vegetable mould, the larva of the Anoxia, dwelling in the sand, and the larva of the Cockchafer in our cultivated fields have not also acquired the faculty of walking on their backs? In their galleries they follow the chimney-sweep's methods quite as cleverly as the Cetonia-grub; to move forward they make valiant use of their backs without yet having come to ambling with their bellies in the air. Can they have neglected to accommodate themselves to the demands of their environment? If evolution and environment cause the topsy-turvy progress of the one, I have the right, if words have any meaning whatever, to demand as much of the others, since their organization is so much alike and their mode of life identical. I have but little respect for theories which, when confronted with two similar cases, are unable to interpret the one without contradicting the other. They make me laugh when they become merely childish. For example: why has the tiger a coat streaked black and yellow? A matter of environment, replies one of our evolutionary masters. Ambushed in bamboo thickets where the golden radiance of the sun is intersected by stripes of shadow cast by the foliage, the animal, the better to conceal itself, assumed the colour of its environment. The rays of the sun produced the tawny yellow of the coat; the stripes of shadow added the black bars. And there you have it. Any one who refuses to accept the explanation must be very hard to please. I am one of these difficult persons. If it were a dinner-table jest, made over the walnuts and the wine, I would willingly sing ditto; but alas and alack, it is uttered without a smile, in a solemn and magisterial manner, as the last word in science! Toussenel, in his day, asked the naturalists an insidious question. (Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885), the author of a number of learned and curious works on ornithology.--Translator's Note.) Why, he enquired, have Ducks a little curly feather on the rump? No one, so far as I know, had an answer for the teasing cross-examiner: evolution had not been invented then. In our time the reason why would be forthcoming in a moment, as lucid and as well-founded as the reason why of the tiger's coat. Enough of childish nonsense. The Cetonia-grub walks on its back because it has always done so. The environment does not make the animal; it is the animal that is made for the environment. To this simple philosophy, which is quite antiquated nowadays, I will add another, which Socrates expressed in these words: "What I know best is that I know nothing." CHAPTER 6. THE TACHYTES.