Without leaving my field of observation, so modest and restricted and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and this time on the subject of the insect. The country around Apt abounds in a curious rock that breaks off in flakes, not unlike sheets of whity-grey cardboard, which burn with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell. It was deposited at the bottom of the great lakes haunted by Crocodiles and giant Tortoises. Those lakes were never beheld by human eye. Their basins have been replaced by the range of the hills; their muds, slowly deposited in thin layers, have become mighty ridges of stone. Let us remove a slab and subdivide it into flakes with the point of a knife, a task as easy as separating the superimposed sheets of a piece of paste-board. In so doing we are examining a volume taken from the library of the mountains; we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to any Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams, nay better, realities converted into pictures. Here is a page of fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Backbone, fins, vertebral column, the little bones of the head, the crystalline lens turned into a black globule: all is there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel tempted to scratch a bit off with our finger and taste this super-secular preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum. There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the deficiency. It tells us: ‘These fish lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly a spate came, asphyxiating them in its mud-thickened torrent. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, they have endured through time and will endure indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.’ The same flood brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so much so that the lacustrian deposit tells also of things on land. It is a general record of the life of the time. Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather of our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves outlined in brown impressions. The stone herbal rivals the botanical clearness of our ordinary herbals. It repeats what the shells have already taught us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in the old days; it no longer includes palm-trees, laurels oozing with camphor, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions.