Whom shall I lodge in my glass trough, kept permanently wholesome by the action of the water weeds? I shall keep caddis worms, those expert dressers. Few of the self-clothing insects surpass them in ingenious attire. The ponds in my neighborhood supply me with five or six species, each possessing an art of its own. Today, but one of these shall receive historical honors. I obtain it from the muddy bottomed, stagnant pools crammed with small reeds. As far as one can judge from the habitation merely, it should be, according to the specialists, Limnophilus flavicornis, whose work has earned for the whole corporation the pretty name of Phryganea, a Greek term meaning a bit of wood, a stick. In a no less expressive fashion, the Provencal peasant calls it lou portofais, lou porto-caneu. This is the little grub that carries through the still waters a faggot of tiny fragments fallen from the reeds. Its sheath, a travelling house, is a composite and barbaric piece of work, a megalithic pile wherein art, retires in favor of amorphous strength. The materials are many and sundry, so much so that we might imagine that we had the work of dissimilar builders before our eyes, if frequent transitions did not tell us the contrary. With the young ones, the novices, it starts with a sort of deep basket in rustic wicker-work. The twigs employed present nearly always the same characteristics and are none other than bits of small, stiff roots, long steeped and peeled under water. The grub that has made a find of these fibers saws them with its mandibles and cuts them into little straight sticks, which it fixes one by one to the edge of its basket, always crosswise, perpendicular to the axis of the work. Picture a circle surrounded by a bristling mass of tangents, or rather a polygon with its sides extended in all directions. On this assemblage of straight lines we place repeated layers of others, without troubling about similarity of position, thus obtaining a sort of ragged fascine, whose sticks project on every side. Such is the bastion of the child grub, an excellent system of defense, with its continuous pile of spikes, but difficult to steer through the tangle of aquatic plants. Sooner or later, the worm forsakes this kind of caltrop which catches on to everything. It was a basket maker, it now turns carpenter; it builds with little beams and joists--that is to say, with round bits of wood, browned by the water, often as wide as a thick straw and a finger's-breadth long, more or less--taking them as chance supplies them. For the rest, there is something of everything in this rag bag: bits of stubble, fag ends of rushes, scraps of plants, fragments of some tiny twig or other, chips of wood, shreds of bark, largish grains, especially the seeds of the yellow iris, which were red when they fell from their capsules and are now black as jet.