THE OLD WEEVILS 179 



much so that the lacustrian deposit talks to us also of 

 things on land. It is a general record of the life of the 

 time. 



Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather our album. 

 Here are winged seeds, leaves drawn in brown prmts. 

 The stone herbal vies in botanical accuracy with a 

 normal herbal. It repeats what the shells had already 

 told us : the world is changing, the sun is losmg its 

 strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not 

 what it was in former days ; it no longer includes palm- 

 trees, camphor-yieldmg laurels, tufted araucarias and 

 many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong 

 to the torrid regions. 



Continue to turn the pages. We now come to the 

 insects. The most frequent are the Diptera, of middling 

 size, often very humble flies and gnats. The teeth of 

 the great Squali astonished us by their soft polish amid 

 the roughness of their chalky veinstone. What shall we 

 say of these frail midges preserved intact m their marly 

 shrine ? The fraU creature, which our fingers could not 

 grasp without crushing it, lies undeformed beneath the 

 weight of the mountains ! 



The six slender legs, which the least thing is enough to 

 disjoint, here lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape 

 and arrangement, in the attitude of the insect at rest. 

 There is nothing lacking, not even the tiny double claws 

 of the extremities. Here are the two wings, unfurled. 

 The fine net-work of their nervures can be studied under 

 the lens as clearly as in the Dipteron of the collections, 

 stuck upon its pin. The antennary tufts have lost 

 none of their subtle elegance ; the belly gives us the 

 number of the rings, edged with a row of atoms that 

 were cilia. 



