incidentally touches on our own origin. In conformity with the Darwinian
ideas, we have accepted an unknown precursor, who by dint of repeated
experiment, adopted as the victuals to be hoarded the larvae of the
Scarabaeidae. This precursor, modified by varying circumstances, is
supposed to have subdivided herself into ramifications, one of which,
digging into vegetable mould and preferring the Cetonia to any other game
inhabiting the same heap, became the Two-banded Scolia; another, also
addicted to exploring the soil, but selecting the Oryctes, left as its
descendant the Garden Scolia; and a third, establishing itself in sandy
ground, where it found the Anoxia, was the ancestress of the Interrupted
Scolia. To these three ramifications we must beyond a doubt add others
which complete the series of the Scolia. As their habits are known to me
only by analogy, I confine myself to mentioning them.

The three species at least, therefore, with which I am familiar would
appear to be derived from a common precursor. To traverse the distance from
the starting-point to the goal, all three have had to contend with
difficulties, which are extremely grave if considered one by one and are
aggravated even more by this circumstance, that the overcoming of one would
lead to nothing unless the others were surmounted as successfully. Success,
then, is contingent upon a series of conditions, each one of which offers
almost no chance of victory, so that the fulfilment of them all becomes a
mathematical absurdity if we are to invoke accident alone.

And, in the first place, how was it that the Scolia of antiquity, having to
provide rations for her carnivorous family, adopted for her prey only those
larvae which, owing to the concentration of their nervous systems, form so
remarkable and so rare an exception in the insect order? What chance would
hazard offer her of obtaining this prey, the most suitable of all because
the most vulnerable? The chance represented by unity compared with the