It would be interesting, if a favourable opportunity occurred, to see how the mother achieves that beautifully regular arrangement of the eggs and also how, as soon as she has laid one, all sticky with varnish, she makes a roof for it with a few scales removed one by one from her hind-quarters. For the moment, the very structure of the finished work tells us the course of the procedure. It is evident that the eggs are not laid in longitudinal files, but in circular rows, in rings, which lie one above the other, alternating their grains. The laying begins at the bottom, near the lower end of the double pine-leaf; it finishes at the top. The first eggs in order of date are those of the bottom ring; the last are those of the top ring. The arrangement of the scales, all in a longitudinal direction and attached by the end facing the top of the leaf, makes any other method of progression inadmissible. Let us consider in the light of reflection the elegant edifice now before our eyes. Young or old, cultured or ignorant, we shall all, on seeing the Bombyx’ pretty little spike, exclaim: “How handsome!” And what will strike us most will be not the beautiful enamel pearls, but the way in which they are put together with such geometrical regularity. Whence we can draw a great moral, to wit, that an exquisite order governs the work of a creature without consciousness, one of the humblest of the humble. A paltry Moth follows the harmonious laws of order. If Micromégas [4] took it into his head to leave Sirius once more and visit our planet, would he find anything to admire among us? Voltaire shows him to us using one of the diamonds of his necklace as a magnifying-glass in order to obtain some sort of view of the three-master which has run aground on his thumb-nail. He enters into conversation with the crew. A nail-paring, curved like a horn, encompasses the ship and serves as a speaking-trumpet; a tooth-pick, which touches the vessel with its tapering end and the lips of the giant, some thousand fathoms above, with the other, serves as a telephone. The outcome of the famous dialogue is that, if we would form a sound judgment of things and see them under fresh aspects, there is nothing like changing one’s planet. The probability then is that the Sirian would have had a rather poor notion of our artistic beauties. To him our masterpieces of statuary, even though sprung from the chisel of a Phidias, would be mere dolls of marble or bronze, hardly more worthy of interest than the children’s rubber dolls are to us; our landscape-paintings would be regarded as dishes of spinach smelling unpleasantly of oil; our opera-scores would be described as very expensive noises.