the slanting sunlight, and
silhouetted against pure emerald. The sculpturing was exquisite. Near
the north poles which pointed obliquely in my direction, the lines
broke up into beads, and the edges of these were frilled and
scalloped; and here again my vision failed and demanded still stronger
binoculars. Here was indeed complexity: a butterfly, one of those
black beauties, splashed with jasper and beryl, hovering nearby, with
taste only for liquid nectar, yet choosing a little weed devoid of
flower or fruit on which to deposit her quota of eggs. She neither
turned to look at their beauties nor trusted another batch to this
plant. Somehow, someway, her caterpillar wormhood had carried, through
the mummified chrysalid and the reincarnation of her present form,
knowledge of an earlier, infinitely coarser diet.

Together with the pure artistic joy which was stirred at the sight of
these tiny ornate globes, there was aroused a realization of
complexity, of helpless, ignorant achievement; the butterfly blindly
pausing in her flower-to-flower fluttering--a pause as momentous to
her race as that of the slow daily and monthly progress of the weed's
struggle to fruition.

I took a final glance at the eggs before returning to my own larger
world, and I detected a new complication, one which left me with
feelings too involved for calm scientific contemplation. As if a
Martian should suddenly become visible to an astronomer, I found that
one of the egg planets was inhabited. Perched upon the summit--quite
near the north pole--was an insect, a wasp, much smaller than the egg
itself. And as I looked, I saw it at the climax of its diminutive
life; for it reared up, resting on the tips of two legs and the
iridescent wings, and sunk its ovipositor deep into the crystalline
surface. As I watched, an egg was deposited, about the latitude of New
York, and with a tremor the tiny wasp withdrew its instrument and
rested.

On the same leaf were casually blown specks of dust, larger than the
quartette of eggs. To the plant the cluster weighed nothing, meant
nothing more than the dust. Yet a moment before they contained the
latent power of great harm to the future growth of the weed--four
lusty caterpillars would work from leaf to leaf with a rapidity and
destructiveness which might, even at the last, have sapped the
maturing seeds. Now, on a smaller scale, but still within the realm of
insect life, all was changed--the plant was safe once