THE CAPRICORN 45 



fully colored, perfect insects, with a distended abdomen, 

 ready to leave the trunk when the hot weather comes 

 again. Life inside the wood, therefore, lasts three years. 

 How is this long period of solitude and captivity spent? 

 In wandering lazily through the thickness of the oak, in 

 making roads whose rubbish serves as food. The horse 

 in Job swallows the ground * in a figure of speech ; the 

 Capricorn!s grub literally eats its way. With its carpen- 

 ter's gouge, a strong black mandible, short, devoid of 

 notches, scooped into a sharp-edged spoon, it digs the 

 opening of its tunnel. The piece cut out is a mouthful 

 which, as it enters the stomach, yields its scanty juices 

 and accumulates behind the worker in heaps of wormed 

 wood. The refuse leaves room in front by passing 

 through the worker. A labor at once of nutrition and of 

 road-making, the path is devoured while constructed ; it 

 is blocked behind as it makes way ahead. That, how- 

 ever, is how all the borers who look to wood for victuals 

 and lodging set about their business. 



For the harsh work of its two gouges, or curved chis- 

 els, the larva of the Capricorn concentrates its muscular 

 strength in the front of its body, which swells into a 

 pestle-head. The Buprestis-grubs, those other industri- 

 ous carpenters, adopt a similar form ; they even exag- 

 gerate their pestle. The part that toils and carves hard 

 wood requires a robust structure; the rest of the body, 

 which has but to follow after, continues slim. The 

 essential thing is that the implement of the jaws should 



1 " Chafing and raging, he swallowcth the ground, neither doth 

 he make account when the noise of the trumpet soundeth." — 

 Job xxxix, 23 (Douai version). — Translator's Note. 



