His capacity for scenting bad weather very soon won the confidence of the household. When we had to go into Orange to renew our provisions, it became the rule to consult him the night before; and, according to his verdict, we went or stayed at home. His oracle never deceived us. In the same way, simple folk that we were, we used in the old days to interrogate the Dor-beetle, [20] another doughty nocturnal worker. But, a little demoralized by imprisonment in a cage and apparently devoid of any special sensitive apparatus, performing his evolutions, moreover, in the mild autumn evenings, the celebrated Dung-beetle could never rival the Pine Caterpillar, who is active during the roughest season of the year and endowed, as everything would seem to affirm, with organs quick to perceive the great atmospheric fluctuations. Rural lore abounds in meteorological forecasts derived from animals. The Cat, sitting in front of the fire and washing behind her ears with a saliva-smeared paw, foretells another cold snap; the Cock, crowing at unusual hours, announces the return of fine weather; the Guinea-fowl, with her screeching, as of a scythe on the grindstone, points to rain; the Hen, standing on one leg, her plumage ruffled, her head sunk on her neck, feels a hard frost coming; the pretty green Tree-frog inflates his throat like a bladder at the approach of a storm and, according to the Provençal peasant, says: “Ploùra, ploùra; it will rain, it will rain!” This rustic meteorology, the heritage of the centuries, does not show up so badly beside our scientific meteorology. Are not we ourselves living barometers? Every veteran complains of his glorious scars when the weather is about to break. One man, though unwounded, suffers from insomnia or from bad dreams; another, though a brain-worker, cannot drag an idea out of his impotent head. Each of us, in his own way, is tried by the passage of those huge funnels which form in the atmosphere and hatch the storm. Could the insect, with its exceptionally delicate organization, escape this kind of impression? It is unbelievable. The insect, more than any other creature, should be an animated meteorological instrument, as truthful in its forecasts, if we knew how to read them, as the lifeless instruments of our observatories, with their mercury and their catgut. All, in different degrees, possess a general impressionability analogous to our own and exercised without the aid of specific organs. Some, better-gifted because of their mode of life, might well be furnished with special meteorological apparatus.