Nervous exhaustion had brought me down to this condition of weakness. And I ask myself to-day whether it had not to some extent given me hallucinations and made me fancy things to be more bizarre than they really were. An intense light flooded the third hall and helped me at once to recover my assurance. On a dresser there was a cage upside down which was knocking about with a rat inside it, as in a prison. When the rat jumped, the cage jumped; hence the noise. At the sight of me, the rodent became quiet. I attached no importance to this little episode. This place, which was less orderly than the others, looked like an ill-kept hothouse. But towels stained with blood and thrown on the ground, lancets lying anyhow among half empty test-tubes, all this told of recent work and might serve as an excuse for the confusion. I began my investigation. The first two witnesses to appear did not give me much information. These were some very humble plants in their china pots. Their names in _um_ or _us_ have gone from my memory, a thing I deplore, for they would give my tale more authoritativeness, and more resonance. But who, at the mention of their ordinary names, could fail to represent to himself a tuft of plantain and a tuft of hare’s-ear? The former was, it is true, of an exceptionally long and supple sort. As for the latter, it had nothing distinctive about it, and, like its fellows, it conscientiously counterfeited a dozen great ear-lobes. On two of its hairy, silvery leaves and on one of the twigs of the plantain below it, a bandage showed like a bracelet of white cloth which tar (apparently) stained brown. I sighed a sigh of relief. “Good,” said I to myself, “Lerne has inoculated them. This is only a repetition of what I have already seen, or rather an early, timid and simple essay, a stage on the road to the rotunda, as _it_ is a stage on the way to the atrocities of the aquarium. I might have begun here, gone on to the central garden of Eden, and finished off by the polypi. Thank God, I have seen the worst.” So ran my thoughts, when _the twig of the plantain twisted about like a worm_! At the same time a mass of shining gray gave a jump which betrayed its presence behind the dresser. There lay in the midst of a pool of blood a rabbit with silvery fur. It had just expired, _and had nothing in the way of ears but two bleeding holes_. The presentiment of the reality made me break out into a sweat. It was then I touched the hairy plant. Having felt the two grafted leaves like ears, I perceived they were _hot and quivering_. A recoil sent me up against the dresser. My hand stiff with disgust tried to shake off the feeling of that contact as it would that of a hideous spider; it knocked violently against the rat’s cage, which fell.