Let us look closely at her work. The grass grows thick and green, drawing its nourishment from the earth. The Locust crops it. The Mantis makes a meal of the Locust and swells out with eggs, which are laid, in three batches, to the number of a thousand. When they hatch, up comes the Ant and levies an enormous tribute on the brood. We appear to be retroceding. In vastness of bulk, yes; in refinement of instinct, certainly not. In this respect how far superior is the Ant to the Mantis! Besides, the cycle of possible happenings is not closed. Young Ants still contained in their cocoon—popularly known as Ants’-eggs—form the food on which the Pheasant’s brood is reared. These are domestic poultry just as much as the Pullet and the Capon, but their keep makes greater demands on the owner’s care and purse. When it grows big, this poultry is let loose in the woods; and people calling themselves civilized take the greatest pleasure in bringing down with their guns the poor creatures which have lost the instinct of self-preservation in the pheasantries, or, to speak plainly, in the poultry-yard. You cut the throat of the Chicken required for roasting; you shoot, with all the parade of sport, that other Chicken, the Pheasant. I fail to understand those insensate massacres. Tartarin of Tarascon, in the absence of game, used to shoot at his cap. I prefer that. And above all I prefer the hunting, real hunting, of another fervent consumer of Ants, the Wryneck, the Tiro-lengo of the Provençaux, so-called because of his scientific method of darting his immensely-long and sticky tongue across a procession of Ants and then suddenly withdrawing it all black with the limed insects. With such mouthfuls as these, the Wryneck becomes disgracefully fat in autumn; he plasters himself with butter on his rump and sides and under his wings; he hangs a string of it round his neck; he pads his skull with it right down to the beak. He is then delicious, roasted: small, I admit; no bigger than a Lark, at the outside; but, small though he be, unlike anything else and immeasurably superior to the Pheasant, who must begin to go bad before developing a flavour at all. Let me for this once do justice to the merit of the humblest! When the table is cleared after the evening meal and all is quiet and my body relieved for the time being of its physiological needs, sometimes I succeed in picking up, here and there, a good idea or two; and it may well be that the Mantis, the Locust, the Ant and even lesser creatures contribute to these sudden gleams of light which flash unaccountably into one’s mind. By strange and devious paths, they have all supplied, in their respective ways, the drop of oil that feeds the lamp of thought. Their energies, slowly developed, stored up and handed down by predecessors, become infused into our veins and sustain our weakness. We live by their death.