hundred steps away, with its tangle of arbutus, rock-roses
and arborescent heather; with its sandy spaces dear to the Bembeces;
with its marly slopes exploited by different Wasps and Bees. And that
is why, foreseeing these riches, I have abandoned the town for the
village and come to Serignan to weed my turnips and water my lettuces.

Laboratories are being founded at great expense, on our Atlantic and
Mediterranean coasts, where people cut up small sea-animals, of but
meagre interest to us; they spend a fortune on powerful microscopes,
delicate dissecting-instruments, engines of capture, boats,
fishing-crews, aquariums, to find out how the yolk of an Annelid's (A
red-blooded Worm.--Translator's Note.) egg is constructed, a question
whereof I have never yet been able to grasp the full importance; and
they scorn the little land-animal, which lives in constant touch with
us, which provides universal psychology with documents of inestimable
value, which too often threatens the public wealth by destroying our
crops. When shall we have an entomological laboratory for the study not
of the dead insect, steeped in alcohol, but of the living insect; a
laboratory having for its object the instinct, the habits, the manner
of living, the work, the struggles, the propagation of that little
world with which agriculture and philosophy have most seriously to
reckon? To know thoroughly the history of the destroyer of our vines
might perhaps be more important than to know how this or that
nerve-fibre of a Cirriped ends (Cirripeds are sea-animals with
hair-like legs, including the Barnacles and Acorn-shells.--Translator's
Note.); to establish by experiment the line of demarcation between
intellect and instinct; to prove, by comparing facts in the zoological
progression, whether human reason be an irreducible faculty or not: all
this ought surely to take precedence of the number of joints in a
Crustacean's antenna. These enormous questions would need an army of
workers; and we have not one. The fashion is all for the Mollusc and
the Zoophyte. (Zoophytes are plant-like sea-animals, including
Star-fishes, Jelly-fishes, Sea-anemones, and Sponges.--Translator's
Note.) The depths of the sea are explored with many drag-nets; the soil
which we tread is consistently disregarded. While waiting for the
fashion to change, I open my harmas laboratory of living entomology;
and this laboratory shall not cost the ratepayers one farthing.

CHAPTER 2