182 THE LIFE AND LOVE OF THE INSECT 



Life, at the start, fashioned oddities which would be 

 screaming discords in the present harmony of things. 

 When it invented the Saurian, it revelled at first in 

 monsters fifteen and twenty yards long. It placed horns 

 on their noses and eyes, paved their backs with fantastic 

 scales, hollowed their necks into spiny wallets, wherein 

 their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, 

 though not with great success, to give them wings. 

 After these horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down 

 and produced the charming green Lizard of our hedges. 



When it invented the bird, it filled its beak with the 

 pointed teeth of the reptile and appended a long, feathered 

 tail unto its rump. These undetermined and revoltingly 

 ugly creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin 

 Redbreast and the Dove. 



All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, 

 an idiot's brain. The brute of antiquity is, first and fore- 

 most, an atrocious machine for snapping, with a stomach 

 for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That 

 will come later. 



The Weevil, in his fashion, to a certain extent, repeats 

 these aberrations. See the extravagant appendage to 

 his little head. It is here a short, thick snout ; there a 

 sturdy beak, round or cut four-square ; elsewhere a crazy 

 reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the 

 tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouth- 

 piece, are the fine shears of the mandibles ; on the sides, 

 the antennae, with their first jomts set in a groove. 



What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature 

 of a nose ? Where did the insect find the model ? 

 Nowhere. The Weevil is its inventor and retains the 

 monopoly. Outside his family, no Coleopteron indulges 

 in these buccal eccentricities. 



