These sudden floods bring a thousand living gleanings, swept off the flanks of the mountains. The dry bed of the Aygues is a most curious botanical garden. You may find there numbers of vegetable species swept down from the higher regions, some temporary, dying without offspring in a season, others permanent, adapting themselves to the new climate. They come from far away from a great height, these exiles; to pluck certain of them in their actual home you would have to climb Ventoux, passing the girdle of beeches and reaching the height at which woody vegetation ceases. An insect which is sometimes found by chance in the osier-beds of the Aygues, and is by itself worth the journey, is the Apoderus of the hazel-tree. It tells us also many things, this little red Weevil “from the heights rich in hazel-bushes” and carried by the storm into the alder-thickets of the Aygues. It reminds us, too, of that other emigrant, whose intimate acquaintance it has become. And we are touched by the analogy between its fate and his own. Fabre too was a child of the heights rich in hazel-bushes. [100] He too had to leave the place of his birth, carried away by the storm that tore him from the bosom of his native mountains to bear him into the plains of Provence. He too made the voyage with very poor and very fragile equipment. For a long time, terribly tossed by the waves, he was more than once sorely bruised, but was yet not broken upon the stones of the torrent; more than once he was whirled suddenly round, but he nevertheless continued to pursue his aim, and finally he pierced the husk and emerged from the shell, to give his activity free scope, as soon as he was able to free himself and establish his lot in a favourable environment. However, contrary to what occurs in the case of the Apoderus, the conditions of his life seem to have been modified as profoundly as those of his geographical habitat; they became perhaps even further removed from those of his origin and his forebears. We know what his paternal ancestors were, and that they had no intimate knowledge of the insect world. His mother’s people were equally regardless of and devoid of affection for the little creatures that so absorbed and delighted him. [101]