More Hunting Wasps by Jean-Henri Fabre
page 73 of 251 (29%)
page 73 of 251 (29%)
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"Le Desert":--Translator's Note.), favoured me one day with his reflections
on the human structure: "Ve, moun bel ami," he said. "Ve, l'home a lou dintre d'un por et lou defero d'uno mounino." "See, my dear friend, see: man has the inside of a pig and the outside of a monkey." I recommend the painter's aphorism to those who might like to discover man's origin in the Hog when the Ape has gone out of fashion. According to David, descent is proved by internal resemblances: "L'home a lou dintre d'un por." The inventory of precursory types sees nothing but organic resemblances and disdains the differences of aptitude. By consulting only the bones, the vertebrae, the hair, the nervures of the wings, the joints of the antennae, the imagination may build up any sort of genealogical tree that will fit with our theories of classification, for, when all is said, the animal, in its widest generalization, is represented by a digestive tube. With this common factor, the way lies open to every kind of error. A machine is judged not by this or that train of wheels, but by the nature of the work accomplished. The monumental roasting-jack of a waggoners' inn and a Breguet chronometer both have trains of cogwheels geared in almost a similar fashion. (Louis Breguet (1803-1883), a famous Parisian watchmaker and physicist.--Translator's Note.) Are we to class the two mechanisms together? Shall we forget that the one turns a shoulder of mutton before the hearth, while the other divides time into seconds? In the same way, the organic scaffolding is dominated from on high by the aptitudes of the animal, especially that superior characteristic, the |
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