escapes them is a few details, for the trade of an ogre fed on live flesh
is familiar to them in its general features; and these unheeded details are
enough to turn their food into poison. What, then, happened in the
beginning, when the larva bit for the first time into a luscious victim?
The inexperienced creature perished; of that there is not a shadow of
doubt, unless we admit an absurdity and imagine the larva of antiquity
feeding upon those terrible ptomaines which so swiftly kill its descendants
to-day.

Nothing will ever make me admit and no unprejudiced mind can admit that
what was once food has become a horrible poison. What the larva of
antiquity ate was live flesh and not putrescence. Nor can it be admitted
that the chances of fortune can have led at the first trial to success in a
system of nourishment so full of pit-falls: fortuitous results are
preposterous amid so many complications. Either the feeding is strictly
methodical at the beginning, in conformity with the organic exigencies of
the prey devoured, and the Wasp established her race; or else it was
hesitating, without determined rules, and the Wasp left no successor. In
the first case we behold innate instinct; in the second acquired habit.

A strange acquisition, truly! An acquisition presumed to be made by an
impossible creature; an acquisition supposed to develop in no less
impossible successors! Though the snow-ball, slowly rolling, at last
becomes an enormous sphere, it is still necessary that the starting-point
shall not have been NIL. The big ball implies the little ball, as small as
you please. Now, in harking back to the origin of these acquired habits, if
I interrogate the possibilities I obtain zero as the only answer. If the
animal does not know its trade thoroughly, if it has to acquire something,
all the more if it has to acquire everything, it perishes: that is
inevitable; without the little snow-ball the big snow-ball cannot be