Magister artis ingenique largitor Venter. One of our proverbs repeats his views in terms a little less crude: L’homme est comme la nèfle; il n’est rien qui vaille S’il n’amûri longtemps au grenier, sur la paille. [74] Insects are like ourselves. Necessity stimulates their wits and at times enables them to make discoveries which upset all our conceptions. I know of one, amongst the humblest and least well-known, which, to safeguard its progeny, has found the following strange solution of the problem: at the laying-season, the normal length of the body is trebled: the fore part is left at the service of the insect, which feeds, digests, roams about and shares in the joys of the sunlight; and the hinder part becomes an infant’s crêche, a nursery in which the little ones are gently exercised. This singular creature is called the Dorthesia (D. Characias, Latt). We find it from time to time on the Greater Spurge, which the Greeks used to call Characias and which the Provençal peasant of to-day calls Chusclo, Lachusclo. A lover of the climate in which the olive flourishes, this spurge abounds on the Sérignan hills, in the driest spots, where its great blue-green tufts contrast with the poverty-stricken vegetation of the neighbourhood. Standing in a bed of pebbles which reflect the sun’s rays upon it, by its vigorous foliage it protests against the hardships of winter. Still, it is not devoid of prudence. When the foolish almond-tree is already abandoning its shivering petals to the north-east wind, the spurge, less hasty, continues to observe the weather and keeps the tender tips of its blossoms rolled up crosier-wise for protection. The worst frosts are over. Then, with a sudden urge of sap, the stems swell with a milk that burns like hot coals and the crosiers uncurl and straighten out into clusters of dingy little flowers, at which the first Gnats of the year come to slake their thirst. Wait a few days longer. As the weather grows milder, we shall see a numerous population slowly emerging from the heap of leaves that have fallen at the foot of the spurge. It is the Dorthesia quitting her winter quarters under the remnants of the old foliage, and climbing, gradually, by cautious stages, from the base to the topmost summits of the plant, where the joys of heat and radiant light await her, together with the delights of an inexhaustible feeding-bottle. In April, or at latest in May, the ascent is completed; all the little creatures are assembled on the topmost tips of the branches, in close-packed groups, side touching side, after the fashion of the Plant-lice. A sap-drinker and endowed with a beak that acts as a gimlet, the Dorthesia is, in fact, related to the Aphides, whose sedentary and social habits she shares; but, far from reminding us in appearance of the plump, naked vermin which the rose-tree and so many other plants have made familiar to us, she is clothed, and her costume is one of unusual elegance.