How many hidden labourers, how many unknown manipulators worked perhaps for centuries, first at getting the rough ore and then at the refining of that grey matter which becomes the brain, the most marvellous of the implements of the mind, even if it were capable only of making us say: “Two and two are four!” The rocket, when rising, reserves for the culminating point of its ascent the dazzling fountain of its many-coloured lights. Then all is dark again. Its smoke, its gases, its oxides will, in the long run, be able to reconstitute other explosives by vegetable processes. Even so does matter act in its metamorphoses. From stage to stage, from one delicate refinement to another yet more delicate, it succeeds in attaining heights where the splendours of the intellect shine forth through its agency; then, shattered by the effort, it relapses into the nameless thing whence it started, into scattered molecules which are the common origin of living things. At the head of the assemblers of organic matter stands the plant, the animal’s senior. Directly or indirectly, it is to-day, as it was in the geological period, the chief purveyor to beings more generously endowed with life. In the laboratory of its cell the food of the universe at least gets its first rough preparation. Comes the animal, which corrects the preparation, improves it and transmits it to others of a higher order. Cropped grass becomes mutton; and mutton becomes human flesh or Wolf-flesh, according to the consumer. Among those elaborators of nourishing atoms which do not create organic matter out of any- and everything, starting with the mineral, as the plant does, the most prolific are the fishes, the first-born of vertebrate animals. Ask the Cod what she does with her millions of eggs. Her answer will be that of the beech with its myriads of nuts, or the oak with its myriads of acorns. She is immensely fruitful in order to feed an immense number of the hungry. She is continuing the work which her predecessors performed in remote ages, when nature, not as yet rich in organic matter, hastened to increase her reserves of life by bestowing prodigious exuberance upon her primeval workers. The Mantis, like the fish, dates back to those distant epochs. Her strange shape and her uncouth habits have told us so. The richness of her ovaries confirms it. She retains in her entrails a feeble relic of the procreative fury that prevailed in olden times under the dank shade of the arborescent ferns; she contributes, in a very humble but none the less real measure, to the sublime alchemy of living things.