Save for a few slight structural details, the Empusa is the Praying Mantis. The peasant confuses them. When, in spring, he meets the mitred insect, he thinks he sees the common PrŠgo-Dieu, who is a daughter of the autumn. Similar forms would seem to indicate similarity of habits. In fact, led away by the extraordinary armour, we should be tempted to attribute to the Empusa a mode of life even more atrocious than that of the Mantis. I myself thought so at first; and any one, relying upon false analogies, would think the same. It is a fresh error: for all her warlike aspect, the Empusa is a peaceful creature that hardly repays the trouble of rearing.

Installed under the gauze bell, whether in assemblies of half a dozen or in separate couples, she at no time loses her placidity. Like the larva, she is very abstemious and contents herself with a Fly or two as her daily ration.

Big eaters are naturally quarrelsome. The Mantis, bloated with Locusts, soon becomes irritated and shows fight. The Empusa, with her frugal meals, does not indulge in hostile demonstrations. There is no strife among neighbours nor any of those sudden unfurlings of the wings so dear to the Mantis when she assumes the spectral attitude and puffs like a startled Adder; never the least inclination for those cannibal banquets whereat the sister who has been worsted in the fight is devoured. Such atrocities or here unknown.

Unknown also are tragic nuptials. The male is enterprising and assiduous and is subjected to a long trial before succeeding. For days and days he worries his mate, who ends by yielding. Due decorum is preserved after the wedding. The feathered groom retires, respected by his bride, and does his little bit of hunting, without danger of being apprehended and gobbled up.

The two sexes live together in peace and mutual indifference until the middle of July. Then the male, grown old and decrepit, takes counsel with himself, hunts no more, becomes shaky in his walk, creeps down from the lofty heights of the trellised dome and at last collapses on the ground. His end comes by a natural death. And remember that the other, the male of the Praying Mantis, ends in the stomach of his gluttonous spouse.

The laying follows close upon the disappearance of the males.

One word more on comparative manners. The Mantis goes in for battle and cannibalism; the Empusa is peaceable and respects her kind. To what cause are these profound moral differences due, when the organic structure is the same? Perhaps to the difference of diet. Frugality, in fact, softens character, in animals as in men; gross feeding brutalizes it. The gormandizer gorged with meat and strong drink, a fruitful source of savage outbursts, could not possess the gentleness of the ascetic who dips his bread into a cup of milk. The Mantis is that gormandizer, the Empusa that ascetic.

Granted. But whence does the one derive her voracious appetite, the other her temperate ways, when it would seem as though their almost identical structure ought to produce an identity of needs? These insects tell us, in their fashion, what many have already told us: that propensities and aptitudes do not depend exclusively upon anatomy; high above the physical laws that govern matter rise other laws that govern instincts.


CHAPTER 4. THE CAPRICORN.

My youthful meditations owe some happy moments to Condillac's famous statue which, when endowed with the sense of smell, inhales the scent of a rose and out of that single impression creates a whole world of ideas. (Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Abb‚ de Mureaux (1715-80), the leading exponent of sensational philosophy. His most important work is the "Trait‚ des sensations," in which he imagines a statue, organized like a man, and endows it with the senses one by one, beginning with that of smell. He argues by a process of imaginative reconstruction that all human faculties and all human knowledge are merely transformed sensation, to the exclusion of any other principle, that, in short, everything has its source in sensation: man is nothing but what he has acquired.--Translator's Note.) My twenty-year-old mind, full of faith in syllogisms, loved to follow the deductive jugglery of the abb‚-philosopher: I saw, or seemed to see, the statue take life in that action of the nostrils, acquiring attention, memory, judgment and all the psychological paraphernalia, even as still waters are aroused and rippled by the impact of a grain of sand. I recovered from my illusion under the instruction of my abler master, the animal. The Capricorn shall teach us that the problem is more obscure than the abb‚ led me to believe.

When wedge and mallet are at work, preparing my provision of firewood under the grey sky that heralds winter, a favourite relaxation creates a welcome break in my daily output of prose. By my express orders, the woodman has selected the oldest and most ravaged trunks in his stack. My tastes bring a smile to his lips; he wonders by what whimsy I prefer wood that is worm-eaten--chirouna, as he calls it--to sound wood which burns so much better. I have my views on the subject; and the worthy man submits to them.

And now to us two, O my fine oak-trunk seamed with scars, gashed with wounds whence trickle the brown drops smelling of the tan-yard. The mallet drives home, the wedges bite, the wood splits. What do your flanks contain? Real treasures for my studies. In the dry and hollow parts, groups of various insects, capable of living through the bad season of the year, have taken up their winter quarters: in the low-roofed galleries, galleries which some Buprestis-beetle has built, Osmia-bees, working their paste of masticated leaves, have piled their cells, one above the other; in the deserted chambers and vestibules, Megachiles (Leaf-cutting Bees.--Translator's Note.) have arranged their leafy jars; in the live wood, filled with juicy saps, the larvae of the Capricorn (Cerambyx miles), the chief author of the oak's undoing, have set up their home.

Strange creatures, of a verity, are these grubs, for an insect of superior organization: bits of intestines crawling about! At this time of year, the middle of autumn, I meet them of two different ages. The older are almost as thick as one's finger; the others hardly attain the diameter of a pencil. I find, in addition, pupae more or less fully coloured, perfect insects, with a distended abdomen, ready to leave the trunk when the hot weather comes again. Life inside the wood, therefore, lasts three years. How is this long period of solitude and captivity spent? In wandering lazily through the thickness of the oak, in making roads whose rubbish serves as food. The horse in Job swallows the ground in a figure of speech; the Capricorn's grub literally eats its way. ("Chafing and raging, he swalloweth the ground, neither doth he make account when the noise of the trumpet soundeth."--Job 39, 23 (Douai version).--Translator's Note.) With its carpenter's gouge, a strong black mandible, short, devoid of notches, scooped into a sharp-edged spoon, it digs the opening of its tunnel. The piece cut out is a mouthful which, as it enters the stomach, yields its scanty juices and accumulates behind the worker in heaps of wormed wood. The refuse leaves room in front by passing through the worker. A labour at once of nutrition and of road-making, the path is devoured while constructed; it is blocked behind as it makes way ahead. That, however, is how all the borers who look to wood for victuals and lodging set about their business.

For the harsh work of its two gouges, or curved chisels, the larva of the Capricorn concentrates its muscular strength in the front of its body, which swells into a pestle-head. The Buprestis-grubs, those other industrious carpenters, adopt a similar form; they even exaggerate their pestle. The part that toils and carves hard wood requires a robust structure; the rest of the body, which has but to follow after, continues slim. The essential thing is that the implement of the jaws should possess a solid support and a powerful motor. The Cerambyx-larva strengthens its chisels with a stout, black, horny armour that surrounds the mouth; yet, apart from its skull and its equipment of tools, the grub has a skin as fine as satin and white as ivory. This dead white comes from a copious layer of grease which the animal's spare diet would not lead us to suspect. True, it has nothing to do, at every hour of the day and night, but gnaw. The quantity of wood that passes into its stomach makes up for the dearth of nourishing elements.