But it is no less certain that he has never
definitely passed it. We know exactly how far he can go; and we
have invariably found that our efforts, our patience, our
encouragement, our passionate appeals, have hitherto failed to
draw him out of the somewhat narrow, darkly enchanted circle
wherein nature seems to have imprisoned him once and for all.
20
There remains, it is true, the insect-world, in which marvellous
things happen. It includes architects, geometricians,
mechanicians, engineers, weavers, physicists, chemists and
surgeons who have forestalled most of our human inventions. I
need not here remind the reader of the wasps' and bees' genius
for building, the social and economic organization of the hive
and the ant-hill, the spider's snares, the eumenes' nest and
hanging egg, the odynerus' cell with its neat stacks of game, the
sacred beetle's filthy but ingenius ball, the leafcutter's
faultless disks, the brick-laying of the mason-bee, the three
dagger-thrusts which the aphex administers to the three
nerve-centres of the cricket, the lancet of the cerceris, who
paralyses her victims without killing them and preserves them for
an indefinite period as fresh meat, nor a thousand other features
which it would be impossible to enumerate without recapitulating
the whole of Henri Fabre's work and completely altering the
proportions of the present essay.
Pages:
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183