178 THE LIFE AND LOVE OF THE INSECT 



crocodiles and giant tortoises. Those lakes no human 

 eye has ever seen. Their basins have been replaced by 

 the ridges of the hills ; their muds, peacefully deposited 

 in thin courses, have become mighty banks of rock. 



Let us break off a slab and subdivide it into sheets 

 with the point of a knife, a work as easy as separating the 

 superposed layers of a piece of paste- or mill-board. In so 

 doing, we are examining a volume taken from the library 

 of the mountains, we are turning the pages of a magnifi- 

 cently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far 

 superior to the Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page 

 are diagrams ; nay, better : realities converted into pic- 

 tures. 



On this page are fish, grouped at random. One might 

 take them for a dish fried in oil. Back-bones, fins, 

 vertebral links, bones of the head, crystal of the eye 

 turned to a black globule, everything is there, in its 

 natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent : the 

 flesh. No matter : our dish of gudgeons looks so good 

 that we feel an inclination to scratch off a bit with our 

 finger and taste this supramillenary preserve. Let us 

 indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel 

 of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum. 



There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection 

 makes good the deficiency. It says to us : 



" These fishes lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful 

 waters. Suddenly, swells came and asphyxiated them 

 in their mud-thickened waves. Buried forthwith in the 

 mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, 

 they have passed through time, will pass through it 

 indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet." 



The same swells brought from the adjacent rain-swept 

 shores a host of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so 



