Laboratories are being founded, at great expense, on our Atlantic
and Mediterranean coasts, where people cut up small sea animals,
of but meager interest to us; they spend a fortune on powerful
microscopes, delicate dissecting instruments, engines of capture,
boats, fishing crews, aquariums, to find out how the yolk of an
Annelid's egg is constructed, a question whereof I have never yet
been able to grasp the full importance; and they scorn the little
land animal, which lives in constant touch with us, which provides
universal psychology with documents of inestimable value, which
too often threatens the public wealth by destroying our crops.
When shall we have an entomological laboratory for the study not
of the dead insect, steeped in alcohol, but of the living insect;
a laboratory having for its object the instinct, the habits, the
manner of living, the work, the struggles, the propagation of that
little world, with which agriculture and philosophy have most
seriously to reckon?

To know thoroughly the history of the destroyer of our vines might
perhaps be more important than to know how this or that nerve
fiber of a Cirriped [sea animals with hair-like legs, including
the barnacles and acorn shells] ends; to establish by experiment
the line of demarcation between intellect and instinct; to prove,
by comparing facts in the zoological progression, whether human
reason be an irreducible faculty or not: all this ought surely to
take precedence of the number of joints in a Crustacean's antenna.
These enormous questions would need an army of workers; and we
have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusk and the
Zoophytes [plant-like sea animals, including starfishes,
jellyfishes, sea anemones and sponges]. The depths of the sea are