The Life of the Weevil 
the Mediterranean, contains hardly anything 
identical with the population of the vanished 
gulf. To find a few features of resemblance 
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 approaching extinction; the 
species are dying out. Thus I am told by 
the numismatics of my stone windowssill. 
Without leaving my field of observation, 
so modest and restricted and yet so rich, let 
us once more consult the stone and this time 
on the subject of the insect. The country 
around Apt abounds in a curious rock that 
breaks off in flakes, not unlike sheets of 
whity-grey cardboard, which burn with a 
sooty flame and a bituminous smell. It was 
deposited at the bottom of the great lakes 
haunted by Crocodiles and giant Tortoises. 
Those lakes were never beheld by human 
eye. Their basins have been replaced by the 
range of the hills; their muds, slowly depo- 
sited in thin layers, have become mighty 
ridges of stone. 
Let us remove a slab and subdivide it into 
flakes with the point of a knife, a task as 
easy as separating the superimposed sheets 
12 
