The Apoderus is a skinless creature, displaying its naked and bleeding misery. Its colour is vermilion, as bright as sealing-wax. It is like a drop of arterial blood coagulated on the dark green of a leaf. To this loud costume, rare among insects, are added other, equally unusual characteristics. The Weevils are all microcephalous. This one exaggerates the absurd disproportion even further: she retains only the indispensable minimum of a head, as though she were trying to do without one altogether. The cranium in which her poor brain is lodged is a paltry, glittering, jet-black speck. In front of this speck is no beak, but a very short, wide snout; behind is an unsightly neck, which one might imagine to have been strangled in a halter. Standing high on her legs, clumsy in her gait, she ambles step by step across her leaf, which she pierces with round windows. The material removed is her food. Faith, a strange creature: a reminiscence, maybe, of some ancient mould, cast aside by life’s progress! Three Apoderi and no more figure in the European fauna. The best-known is that of the hazel. This is the one to whom I propose to devote my attention. I find her here, not on the hazel, her lawful domain, but on the common alder. This change in her activities deserves a brief investigation. My district does not suit the hazel very well; the climate is unfavourable, being too hot and dry. On the high slopes of Mont Ventoux it grows sparsely; in the plain, except in the gardens where a few find a footing, they are no longer to be seen. In the absence of the fostering bush, the insect, without becoming impossible, is at least extremely rare. Long though I have been beating the brambles of my countryside over an umbrella held upside down, here is our Apoderus for the first time. For three springs in succession I see the red Weevil on the alder and observe her work. One tree, one alone and always the same, in the osier-beds of the Aygues provides me with this leaf-roller, whom I now for the first time see alive. The other alders round about have not a trace of her, though they are only a few yards distant. There is here, on this privileged tree, a small, accidental colony, a settlement of foreigners, who are becoming acclimatized before extending their domain. How did they come here? Undoubtedly brought by the torrent. The geographers call the Aygues a water-course. As an eye-witness, I should call it, more accurately, a pebble-course. Understand me: I do not mean that the dry pebbles flow down it of themselves; the low gradient does not permit of such an avalanche. But only let it rain; and they will stream fast enough. Then I can hear the roar of the grinding stones from my house, a mile and a quarter distant.