THE TOMB OF PEARL 



opening and survey the neighbourhood, to go out and 

 draw back as it would from a hole with inert walls. 

 Having given its guest permission to lodge there, 

 having allowed it to take, up all the room it needs, it 

 continues to permit it to make itself at home, like a 

 good landlord, with the extraordinary peculiarity that 

 the lodging itself, situated in the very body of the land- 

 lord, is in the rectum. Nature often surprises us by its 

 arrangements, but it would be difficult to discover a 

 device more astonishing than this particular one. 



We may regard it with astonishment, and indeed so 

 we should, but we ought further to consider it in its 

 true light, and see what it actually implies. It is emi- 

 nently significant, and as full of suggestion as may be. It 

 marks a definite level from which we may measure others. 

 If it were anything less, we might see in it nothing but 

 an ordinary association, such as we find in those species 

 of fish which frequently shelter themselves beneath a 

 piece of floating wreckage or under the parasol-shaped 

 body of a jelly-fish. If it were anything more, it would 

 take advantage of the situation to feed the guest at the 

 expense of the host, and become a complete parasite, 

 like the intestinal worm. But in its case, we have some- 

 thing betwixt and between, and when we put it in its 

 proper place in the series which begins with the pearl 

 oyster, it helps us to see things as a whole. 



Nature, in its immensity and diversity, rearing its 

 individuals in the mass, distributes to all the means 

 to live. In the first place, it procures these means of 

 itself; but, more than this, it brings together as best it 

 can those creatures to which it gives life, and makes 

 them help one another; it compels them to aid one 

 another. If, sometimes, the form this assistance takes 

 surprises us, its significance is the one thing to bear in 

 mind. Nature makes use of everything that it contains. 

 It uses the flesh of one to form that of another; it makes 

 use of death itself to take this maintenance to its ulti- 

 mate limit; it brings life itself to contribute to the better 

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