260 SOCIAL LIFE IN THE INSECT WORLD 



property. Wherever food is amassed, the consumers 

 collect from the four corners of the sky ; they invite 

 themselves to the feast of abundance, and the richer the 

 food the greater their numbers. Man, who alone is 

 capable of inducing agrarian abundance, is by that 

 very fact the giver of an immense banquet at which 

 legions of feasters take their place. By creating more 

 juicy and more generous fruits he calls to his enclosures, 

 despite himself, thousands and thousands of hungry 

 creatures, against whose appetites his prohibitions are 

 helpless. The more he produces, the larger is the tribute 

 demanded of him. Wholesale agriculture and vegetable 

 abundance favour our rival the insect. 



This is the immanent law. Nature, with an equal zeal, 

 offers her mighty breast to all her nurslings alike ; to 

 those who live by the goods of others no less than to the 

 producers. For us, who plough, sow, and reap, and 

 weary ourselves with labour, she ripens the wheat ; she 

 ripens it also for the little Calender-beetle, which, 

 although exempted from the labour of the fields, enters 

 our granaries none the less, and there, with its pointed 

 beak, nibbles our wheat, grain by grain, to the husk. 



For us, who dig, weed, and water, bent with fatigue 

 and burned by the sun, she swells the pods of the pea ; 

 she swells them also for the weevil, which does no 

 gardener's work, yet takes its share of the harvest at its 

 own hour, when the earth is joyful with the new life 

 of spring. 



Let us follow the manoeuvres of this insect which 

 takes its tithe of the green pea. I, a benevolent rate- 

 payer, will allow it to take its dues ; it is precisely to 

 benefit it that I have sown a few rows of the beloved 



