The Life of the Weevil 
fancies, will admit that the cigar-roller can 
have tired of her cylinder one day and 
proceeded, as a crazy innovator, to make a 
hole in the casket of a fruit-stone. Such 
dissimilar industries do not suggest mutual 
connection. The first leaf-rollers, never 
knowing any lack of leaves, may perhaps 
have gone from one tree to others more or 
less like it; but to give up the art of leaf- 
rolling, so easy to acquire, and to become, 
when nothing compelled them to, strenuous 
nibblers of hard wood: that would have been 
idiotic. No acceptable reason would explain 
the desertion of the original trade. Such 
follies are unknown in the insect world. 
The exploiter of the sloe refuses in her 
turn to acknowledge herself as inspiring the 
cigar-maker : 
‘““What, I!” she says, “I, give up my little 
blue plum, so savoury in its tartness! I, a 
chaser of goblets, abandon my chisel and, in 
a moment of madness, become a folder of 
leaves! What do you take me for? My 
grub dotes on the floury kernel; confronted 
with any other fare, above all with the 
meagre, tasteless roll of my colleague of the 
poplar, it would let itself die of hunger. So 
202 
