The Life of the Weevil 



The craters in the sloes have their lava, 

 that is, their flow of gum, which trickles from 

 the various points injured and then hardens 

 into blocks. This flood stops up every hole 

 at which the insect has merely fed. The 

 large pits with the central cones, on the other 

 hand, have no gum or show only a few scanty 

 drops of it on their walls. 



The mother, it is obvious, has taken 

 certain precautions to defend the home of the 

 egg against the inroads of the gum. In the 

 first place, she has enlarged the cavity to 

 keep the egg at a due distance from the 

 treacherous wall oozing with viscidity; she 

 has moreover dug the pulp down to the stone 

 and has thoroughly stripped a perfectly clean 

 surface from which nothing dangerous can 

 now exude. 



This is not yet enough : though distant and 

 rising perpendicularly from the stripped area, 

 the walls of the pit still give cause for alarm. 

 In some sloes under certain conditions, they 

 will perhaps yield a superabundance of gum. 

 The only means of averting the danger is 

 to raise above the egg a barricade as high 

 as the brink of the crater and capable of 

 arresting the flow. This is the reason for 

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