Amazement seizes upon us before this sublime phantasmagoria of the grain of hemp which in a few hours has been transmuted into the finest cloth. What a mighty artist is Life, shooting her shuttle to weave the wings of the locust--one of those insignificant insects of whom long ago Pliny said: _In his tam parcis, fere nullis, quae vis, quae sapientia, quam inextricabilis perfectio!_ How truly was the old naturalist inspired! Let us repeat with him: "What power, what wisdom, what inconceivable perfection in this least of secrets that the vineyard locust has shown us!" I have heard that a learned inquirer, for whom life is only a conflict of physical and chemical forces, does not despair of one day obtaining artificially organisable matter--_protoplasm_, as the official jargon has it. If it were in my power I should hasten to satisfy this ambitious gentleman. But so be it: you have really prepared protoplasm. By force of meditation, profound study, minute care, impregnable patience, your desire is realised: you have extracted from your apparatus an albuminous slime, easily corruptible and stinking like the devil at the end of a few days: in short, a nastiness. What are you going to do with it? Organise something? Will you give it the structure of a living edifice? Will you inject it with a hypodermic syringe between two impalpable plates to obtain were it only the wing of a fly? That is very much what the locust does. It injects its protoplasm between the two surfaces of an embryo organ, and the material forms a wing-cover, because it finds as guide the ideal archetype of which I spoke but now. It is controlled in the labyrinth of its course by a device anterior to the injection: anterior to the material itself. This archetype, the co-ordinator of forms; this primordial regulator; have you got it on the end of your syringe? No! Then throw away your product. Life will never spring from that chemical filth. CHAPTER XXI THE PINE-CHAFER The orthodox denomination of this insect is _Melolontha fullo_, Lin. It does not answer, I am very well aware, to be difficult in matters of nomenclature; make a noise of some sort, affix a Latin termination, and you will have, as far as euphony goes, the equivalent of many of the tickets pasted in the entomologist's specimen boxes. The cacophony would be excusable if the barbarous term signified nothing but the creature signified; but as a rule this name possesses, hidden in its Greek or other roots, a certain meaning in which the novice hopes to find instruction.