Let us watch her at work. She picks the leaf which she proposes to roll from the young shoots sprouting in sheaves at the base of the trunk, but picks it not among the lower leaves, which are already the correct green and of a firm texture, nor yet among the terminal leaves, which are in a fair way of growing. Above, they are too young, not wide enough; below, they are too old, too tough, too hard to manage. The leaf selected belongs to the intermediate rows. As yet of a doubtful green, in which yellow predominates, soft and glossy with varnish, it has, or has very nearly, the final dimensions. Its denticulations swell into delicate glandular pads, whence oozes a little of the viscous matter that tars the buds at the moment when their bracts become disjoined. A word now on the equipment in respect of tools. The legs are supplied with double claws shaped like the meat-hooks of a steel-yard. The lower side of the tarsi carries a thick tuft of white bristles. Thus shod, the insect clambers very nimbly up the most slippery vertical walls; it can stand and run like a fly, with its back downwards, on the ceiling of a glass bell. This characteristic alone is enough to suggest the subtle sense of equilibrium which the Weevil’s work will demand. The curved and powerful beak or rostrum, without being exaggerated in size, spreads at the tip into a spatula ending in a pair of fine, shear-like mandibles. It makes an excellent bodkin, which plays the first or leading part in the whole work. The leaf, in fact, cannot be rolled in its actual condition. It is a live blade which, owing to the afflux of the sap and the tonicity of the tissues, would resume its flat formation in proportion as the insect endeavoured to curve it. The dwarf insect has not the strength to master a piece of these dimensions, to roll it up so long as it retains the elasticity of life. This is evident to our eyes; it is evident also to the eyes of the Weevil. How is she to obtain the degree of inert suppleness required in the circumstances? We ourselves would say: “We must pluck the leaf, let it fall to the earth, and manipulate it on the ground when it is rightly withered.” The Curculionid is cleverer than we at this sort of business and does not share our opinion. What she says to herself is: “On the ground, amid the obstruction of the grass, my labours would be impracticable. I want elbow-room; I want the thing to hang in the air, where there are no obstacles of any kind. And there is a more serious consideration: my grub would refuse a rank, dried-up sausage; it insists on food that retains a certain freshness. The scroll which I intend for its consumption must be not a dead leaf, but an impaired leaf, not altogether deprived of the juices with which the tree supplies it. I must wean my joint, but not kill it outright, so that the dying leaf may remain in its place for the few days during which the extreme youth of the worm lasts.”