with fine and very loose earth, they
descend to a depth of three or four inches at most. I dig up a few in
mid-winter. I always find them carrying their faint stern-light. About
the month of April they come up again to the surface, there to continue
and complete their evolution.

From start to finish the Glow-worm's life is one great orgy of light.
The eggs are luminous; the grubs likewise. The full-grown females are
magnificent lighthouses, the adult males retain the glimmer which the
grubs already possessed. We can understand the object of the feminine
beacon; but of what use is all the rest of the pyrotechnic display? To
my great regret, I cannot tell. It is and will be, for many a day to
come, perhaps for all time, the secret of animal physics, which is
deeper than the physics of the books.

CHAPTER 14. THE CABBAGE-CATERPILLAR.

The cabbage of our modern kitchen-gardens is a semi-artificial plant,
the produce of our agricultural ingenuity quite as much as of the
niggardly gifts of nature. Spontaneous vegetation supplied us with the
long-stalked, scanty-leaved, ill-smelling wilding, as found, according
to the botanists, on the ocean cliffs. He had need of a rare
inspiration who first showed faith in this rustic clown and proposed to
improve it in his garden-patch.

Progressing by infinitesimal degrees, culture wrought miracles. It
began by persuading the wild cabbage to discard its wretched leaves,
beaten by the sea-winds, and to replace them by others, ample and
fleshy and close-fitting. The gentle cabbage submitted without protest.
It deprived itself of the joys of light by arranging its leaves in a
large compact head, white and tender. In our day, among the successors
of those first tiny hearts, are some that, by virtue of their massive
bulk, have earned the glorious name of chou quintal, as who should say
a hundredweight of cabbage. They are real monuments of green stuff.

Later, man thought of obtaining a generous dish with a thousand little
sprays of the inflorescence. The cabbage consented. Under the cover of
the central leaves, it gorged with food its sheaves of blossom, its
flower-stalks, its branches and worked the lot into a fleshy
conglomeration. This is the cauliflower, the broccoli.

Differently entreated, the plant, economizing in the centre of its
shoot, set a whole family of close-wrapped cabbages ladder-wise on a
tall stem. A multitude of dwarf leaf-buds took the place of the
colossal hea