The Old Weevils 
the modest records which I am able to 
consult, must therefore be the oldest of the 
Beetles. 
In the beginning, life fashioned oddities 
which would be screaming discords in the 
present harmony of things. When it 
invented the saurian, it revelled at first in 
monsters from fifteen to twenty yards long. 
It placed horns upon their noses and above 
their eyes, paved their backs with fantastic 
scales and hollowed their necks into spiny 
pouches wherein their heads withdrew as into 
a hood. It even tried, though with no great 
success, to give them wings. After these 
horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down 
and produced the charming Green Lizard of 
our hedges. 
When it invented the bird, it filled its beak 
with the reptile’s pointed teeth and 
suspended from its rump a long, feather- 
clad tail. These indeterminate and revolt- 
ingly hideous creatures were the distant 
prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the 
Dove. 
All these primitives are noted for a very 
small skull, an idiot’s brain. The prehistoric 
animal is first and foremost an atrocious 
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