CHAPTER XXXIV 



Betam to St. L^gei-en-Yvelines — ^Norka — Studies on the death of the 

 silk-worm moth — ^War declared — Mobilisation. 



The drawback of the holidays consisted, for Metclmi- 

 kofE, in coming away from his laboratory and in 

 the impossibility of following his diet in a hotel or 

 a boarding-house. We therefore resolved to hire a 

 cottage in some quiet place, to organise a small 

 laboratory, and to continue our usual mode of life. 



St. Leger-en-YveUnes, where we had spent \part of 

 the preceding summer, answered all our requirements. 

 We took a small villa there and called it " Norka," 

 which means in Russian " little hole," " little refuge," 

 and came there for the holidays in Jidy 1914. 



Elie seemed pleased to be there ; thanks to the 

 laboratory, he could easily vary his occupations, for 

 continuous reading fatigued him. His reflections 

 having led him to the problem of natural death, he 

 had for some time been seeking for a subject on which 

 he could study the mechanism of the phenomenon. 

 He had formerly studied the May-flies (Ephemeridse), 

 predestined to a natural death by their rudimentary 

 buccal organs, incapable of use in feeding. But 

 the life of those insects, a life of a few hours or a 

 few days at the most, was too short to allow the 

 necessary researches. The males of the Rotifera, 

 which are also deprived of buccal organs and even of 



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