We stand astounded at this sublime phantasmagoria of a grain of hemp-seed which in a few hours becomes a superb piece of linen. What a proud artist is life, driving its shuttle to weave the wings of a Locust, one of those insignificant insects of which Pliny, long ago said: “In his tam parvis, fere nullis, quæ vis, quæ sapientia, quam inextricabilis perfectis!” How well the old naturalist was inspired on this occasion! Let us repeat after him: “What power, what wisdom, what indescribable perfection in the tiny corner of life which the Locust of the vines has shown us!” I have heard that a learned enquirer, to whom life was but a conflict of physical and chemical forces, did not despair of one day obtaining artificial organizable matter: protoplasm, as the official jargon has it. Were it in my power, I should hasten to satisfy this ambitious person. Very well, be it so: you have thoroughly prepared your protoplasm. By dint of long hours of meditation, deep study, scrupulous care and inexhaustible patience, your wishes have been fulfilled; you have extracted from your apparatus an albuminous glair, which goes bad easily and stinks like the very devil in a few days’ time: in short, filth. What do you propose to do with your product? Will you organize it? Will you give it the structure of a living edifice? Will you take a hypodermic syringe and inject it between two impalpable films to obtain were it only the wing of a Gnat? For that is more or less what the Locust does. He injects his protoplasm between the two scales of the pinion; and the material becomes a wing-case, because it finds as a guide the ideal archetype of which I spoke just now. It is controlled in its intricate windings by a plan which existed before the injection, before the material itself. Have you this archetype, this coordinator of forms, this primordial regulator, at the end of your syringe? No? Then throw away your product! No life will ever spring from that chemical ordure. CHAPTER XX THE FOAMY CICADELLA In April, when the Swallow and the Cuckoo visit us, let us consider the fields for a while, keeping our eyes on the ground, as befits the eager observer of insect-life. We shall not fail to see, here and there, on the grass, little masses of white foam. It might easily be taken for a spray of frothy spittle from the lips of a passer-by; but there is so much of it that we soon abandon this first idea. Never would human saliva suffice for so lavish an expenditure of foam, even if some one with nothing better to do were to devote all his disgusting and misdirected zeal to the effort.