And for this reason what revelry up above! The Sparrow is the first to hear of the ripe cherries and comes trooping, morning and evening, to pilfer and squall; he informs his friends in the neighbourhood, the Greenfinch and the Warbler, who hasten up and banquet for weeks on end. Butterflies flit from one nibbled cherry to another, taking delicious sips at each. Rose-chafers bite great mouthfuls out of the fruit, then fall asleep sated. Wasps and Hornets burst open the sweet caskets; and the Gnats follow to get drunk in their wake. A plump maggot, settled in the very centre of the pulp, blissfully feasts upon its juicy dwelling-house and waxes big and fat. It will rise from table to change into a comely Fly. On the ground there are others at the banquet. A host of footpads is battening on the fallen cherries. At night, the Field-mice come gathering the stones stripped by the Wood-lice, Earwigs, Ants and Slugs; they hoard them in their burrows. During the long winter they will make holes in them to extract and nibble the kernels. A numberless throng lives upon the generous cherry-tree. What would the tree require to provide a successor one day and maintain its species in a state of harmonious and well-balanced prosperity? A single seed would be enough; and every year it gives forth bushels and bushels. Tell me why, please. Shall we say that the cherry-tree, at first very economical with its fruit, became lavish by degrees in order thus to escape its multitudinous ravagers? Shall we say of the tree, as we said of the Mantis, that excessive destruction gradually induced excessive production? Who would dare to venture on such rash statements? Is it not perfectly obvious that the cherry-tree is one of those factories in which elements are wrought into organic matter, one of those laboratories in which the dead thing is changed into the thing fitted to live? No doubt, cherries ripen that they may be perpetuated; but these are the minority, the very small minority. If all seeds were to sprout and to develop fully, there would long ago have been no room on the earth for the cherry-tree alone. The vast majority of its fruits fulfil another function. They serve as food for a crowd of living creatures, who are not skilled as the plant is in the transcendental chemistry that turns the uneatable into the eatable. Matter, in order to serve in the highest manifestations of life, must undergo slow and most delicate elaboration. That elaboration begins in the workshop of the infinitely small, of the microbe, for instance, one of which, more powerful than the lightning’s might, combines oxygen and nitrogen and produces nitrates, the primary food of plants. It begins on the confines of nothingness, is improved in the vegetal, is yet further refined in the animal and step by step attains the substance of the brain.