THE OLD WEEVILS 177 



mineralized, intact to the tiniest details of his- striae 

 and scales, a frail ornament ; more often, he has dis- 

 appeared, dissolved, and his house has rilled with a fine 

 sea mud, hardened into a chalky kernel. 



In this quiet inlet, some eddy has collected and 

 drowned at the bottom of the mire, now turned into 

 marl, enormous heaps of shells, of every shape and size. 

 It is a molluscs' burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. 

 I dig up oysters a cubit long and weighing five or six 

 pounds apiece. One could shovel up, in the immense 

 pile, Scallops, Cones, Cytheridae, Mactridae, Murices, 

 Turritellidae, Mitridse and others too numerous, too 

 innumerable to mention. You stand stupefied before 

 the vital ardour of the days of old, which was able to 

 supply such a pile of relics in a mere nook of earth. 



The necropolis of shells tells us, besides, that time, that 

 patient renewer of the order of things, has mown down 

 not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the 

 species. Nowadays, the neighbouring sea, the Mediter- 

 ranean, has almost nothing identical with the population 

 of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of similarity 

 between the present and the past, we should have to seek 

 them in the tropical seas. The climate, therefore, has 

 become colder ; the sun is slowly becoming extinguished ; 

 the species are dying out. Thus speak the numismatics 

 of the stones on my window-ledge. 



Without leaving my field of observation, so modest, so 

 limited and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone 

 and, this time, on the subject of the insect. The country 

 round Apt abounds in a strange rock that breaks off in 

 thin plates, similar to sheets of whitish cardboard. It 

 burns with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell ; and it 

 was deposited at the bottom of great lakes haunted by 



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