Poor, desperate thing, why don’t you copy your young sister? Do what the little larva did just now: build an awning with particles taken from the wall of your house; and your liquid putty will do well on that spongy scaffolding! The large grub, trusting to its trowel, does not think of that method. It exhausts itself, without any appreciable result, in trying to effect repairs which the little grub managed most ingeniously. What the baby knew how to do the big larva no longer knows. Insect industry has instances like this of professional methods employed at certain periods and then abandoned and utterly forgotten. A few days more or less make changes in the creature’s talents. The tiny grub, devoid of cement, has bricks to fall back upon: the big larva, rich in putty, scorns to build, or rather no longer knows how, though it is even better-endowed than the youngster with the necessary tools. The strong one no longer remembers what as a weakling he so well knew how to do, only a few days before. A poor power of recollection, if indeed there be such a power under that flat skull! However, in the long run and thanks to the evaporation of the ejected materials, the short-memoried plumber ends by stopping up the window. Nearly half a day has been spent in trowel-work. The idea occurs to me to try whether the mother will come to the distressed one’s aid in like circumstances. We have seen her diligently restoring the ceiling which I smashed above the egg. Will she do for the big grub what she did for the sake of the germ? Will she repair the torn pill in which the plasterer is helplessly floundering? To make the experiment more conclusive, I select pills that do not belong to the mother entrusted with the work of restoration. I picked them up in the fields. They are far from regular, are all dented because of the stony soil on which they lay, a soil not easily convertible into a roomy workshop and consequently unsuited to exact geometry. They are moreover encrusted with a reddish rind, due to the ferruginous sand in which I packed them in order to avoid dangerous jolting on the road. In short, they differ a good deal from those elaborated in a jar, with plenty of space around them and on a clean support, pills which are perfect ovoids, free from earthy stains. In the top of two of them I make an opening which the grub, faithful to its methods, at once strives to stop up, but without success. One, stored away under a bell-glass, will serve me as a witness. The other I place in a jar where the mother is watching her cradles, two splendid ovoids.