ed 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
meager 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 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 fiber of
a Cirriped [sea animals with hair-like legs, including the barnacles and
acorn shells] ends; 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 Mollusk
and the Zoophytes [plant-like sea animals, including starfishes,
jellyfishes, sea anemones and sponges]. 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 II. THE ANTHRAX

I made the acquaintance of the Anthrax in 1855 at Carpentras, at the
time when the life history of the oil beetles was causing me to search
the tall slopes beloved of the Anthophora bees [mason bees]. Her curious
pupae, so powerfully equipped to force an outlet for the perfect
insect incapable of the least effort, those pupae armed with a multiple
plowshare at the fore, a trident at the