THE GREY LOCUST 315 



Amazement seizes upon us before this sublime phantas- 

 magoria of the grain of hemp which in a few hours has 

 been transmuted into the finest cloth. What a mighty 

 artist is Life, shooting her shuttle to weave the wings of the 

 locust — one of those insignificant insects of whom long 

 ago Pliny said : In his tarn parcis, fere ntUlis, quae vis, 

 quae sapientia, qiiam inextricahilis perfeciio ! 



How truly was the old naturalist inspired ! Let us 

 repeat with him : ^' What power, what wisdom, what 

 inconceivable perfection in this least of secrets that the 

 vineyard locust has shown us 1 " 



I have heard that a learned inquirer, for whom life is 

 only a conflict of physical and chemical forces, does not 

 despair of one day obtaining artificially organisable 

 matter — protoplasm, as the official jargon has it. If it 

 were in my power I should hasten to satisfy this 

 ambitious gentleman. 



But so be it : you have really prepared protoplasm. 

 By force of meditation, profound study, minute care, 

 impregnable patience, your desire is realised : you have 

 extracted from your apparatus an albuminous slime, easily 

 corruptible and stinking like the devil at the end of a few 

 days : in short, a nastiness. What are you going to do 

 with it ? 



Organise something ? Will you give it the structure of 

 a Hving edifice ? Will you inject it with a hypodermic 

 syringe between two impalpable plates to obtain were it 

 only the wing of a fly ? 



That is very much what the locust does. It injects its 

 protoplasm between the two surfaces of an embryo organ, 

 and the material forms a wing-cover, because it finds as 

 guide the ideal archetype of which I spoke but now. It 



