More fortunate in my tubes with their sifted and wetted mould, here you are outside, you little white-striped nigger; you bite at the lettuce-leaf which I have given you; you leap about gaily in the cage where I have housed you. It would be easy to rear you, I can see, but it would not give me much fresh information. Let us then part company. I restore you to liberty. In return for what you have taught me, I bestow upon you the grass and the Locusts in the garden. Thanks to you, I know that Grasshoppers, in order to leave the ground in which the eggs are laid, possess a provisional shape, a primary larval stage, which keeps those too cumbrous parts, the long legs and antennæ, swathed in a common sheath; I know that this sort of mummy, fit only to lengthen and shorten itself a little, has for an organ of locomotion a hernia in the neck, a throbbing blister, an original piece of mechanism which I have never seen used elsewhere as an aid to progression. [52] CHAPTER XIII THE WHITE-FACED DECTICUS: THE INSTRUMENT OF SOUND Art has three fields which it may cultivate in the realm of natural objects: form, colour and sound. The sculptor uses form and imitates its perfection in so far as the chisel is able to imitate life. The draughtsman, likewise a copyist, seeks in black and white to give the illusion of relief on a flat surface. To the difficulties of drawing the painter adds those of colour, which are no less great. An inexhaustible model sits to all three. Rich though the painter’s palette be, it will always be inferior to that of reality. Nor will the sculptor’s chisel ever exhaust the treasures of the plastic art in nature. Form and colour, beauty of outline and play of light: these are all taught by the contemplation of actual things. They are imitated, they are combined according to our tastes, but they are not invented. On the other hand, our music has no prototype in the symphony of created things. Certainly there is no lack of sounds, faint or loud, sweet and solemn. The wind roaring through the storm-tossed woods, the waves curling and breaking on the beach, the thunder growling in the echoing clouds stir us with their majestic notes; the breeze filtering through the tiny foliage of the pine-trees, the Bees humming over the spring flowers charm every ear endowed with any delicacy; but these are monotonous noises, with no connection. Nature has superb sounds; she has no music.