So far so good. But now tell me, if you please, why the larvae of the
Oryctes and the Scarabaeus, living in vegetable mould, the larva of the
Anoxia, dwelling in the sand, and the larva of the Cockchafer in our
cultivated fields have not also acquired the faculty of walking on their
backs? In their galleries they follow the chimney-sweep's methods quite as
cleverly as the Cetonia-grub; to move forward they make valiant use of
their backs without yet having come to ambling with their bellies in the
air. Can they have neglected to accommodate themselves to the demands of
their environment? If evolution and environment cause the topsy-turvy
progress of the one, I have the right, if words have any meaning whatever,
to demand as much of the others, since their organization is so much alike
and their mode of life identical.

I have but little respect for theories which, when confronted with two
similar cases, are unable to interpret the one without contradicting the
other. They make me laugh when they become merely childish. For example:
why has the tiger a coat streaked black and yellow? A matter of
environment, replies one of our evolutionary masters. Ambushed in bamboo
thickets where the golden radiance of the sun is intersected by stripes of
shadow cast by the foliage, the animal, the better to conceal itself,
assumed the colour of its environment. The rays of the sun produced the
tawny yellow of the coat; the stripes of shadow added the black bars.

And there you have it. Any one who refuses to accept the explanation must
be very hard to please. I am one of these difficult persons. If it were a
dinner-table jest, made over the walnuts and the wine, I would willingly
sing ditto; but alas and alack, it is uttered without a smile, in a solemn
and magisterial manner, as the last word in science! Toussenel, in his day,
asked the naturalists an insidious question. (Alphonse Toussenel (1803-
1885), the author of a number of learned and curious works on ornithology.-