The Life of the Grasshopper 



chemical forces, did not despair of one day 

 obtaining artificial organizable matter: pro- 

 toplasm, as the official jargon has it. Were 

 it in my power, I should hasten to satisfy 

 this ambitious person. 



Very well, be it so : you have thoroughly 

 prepared your protoplasm. By dint of long 

 hours of meditation, deep study, scrupulous 

 care and inexhaustible patience, your wishes 

 have been fulfilled; you have extracted from 

 your apparatus an albuminous glair, which 

 goes bad easily and stinks like the very devil 

 in a few days' time : in short, filth. What 

 do you propose to do with your product? 



Will you organize it? Will you give it 

 the structure of a living edifice? Will you 

 take a hypodermic syringe and inject it be- 

 tween two impalpable films to obtain were 

 it only the wing of a Gnat? 



For that is more or less what the Locust 

 does. He injects his protoplasm between 

 the two scales of the pinion; and the ma- 

 terial becomes a wing-case, because it finds 

 as a guide the ideal archetype of which I 

 spoke just now. It is controlled in its in- 

 tricate windings by a plan which existed 

 before the injection, before the material 

 itself. 



422 



