d 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
abbe-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 abbe 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 differ