on.

Nor can any be compared with the Anthrax as regards the means brought
into play in order to leave the cell. These others, when they become
perfect insects, have implements for sapping and demolishing, stout
mandibles, capable of digging the ground, of pulling down clay partition
walls and even of reducing the mason bee's tough cement to powder. The
Anthrax, in her final form, has nothing like this. Her mouth is a short,
soft proboscis, good at most for soberly licking the sugary exudations
of the flowers; her slim legs are so feeble that to move a grain of
sand were an excessive task for them, enough to strain every joint; her
great, stiff wings, which must remain full spread, do not allow her to
slip through a narrow passage; her delicate suit of downy velvet, from
which you take the bloom by merely breathing on it, could not withstand
the rough contact of the gallery of a mine. Unable herself to enter the
Mason bee's cell to lay her egg, she cannot leave it either, when the
time comes to free herself and appear in broad daylight in her wedding
dress. The larva, on its side, is powerless to prepare the way for
the coming flight. That buttery little cylinder, owning no tools but a
sucker so flimsy that it barely arrives at substance and so small that
it is almost a geometrical point, is even weaker than the adult insect,
which at least flies and walks. The Mason bee's cell represents to it
a granite cave. How to get out? The problem would be insoluble to those
two incapables, if nothing else played its part.

Among insects, the nymph, or pupa, the transition stage between the
larval and the adult form, is generally a striking picture of every
weakness of a budding organism. A sort of mummy tight bound in swaddling
clothes, motionless and impassive, it awaits the resurrection. Its
tender tissues flow in every direction; its limbs, transparent as
crystal, are held fixed in their place, along the side, lest a
movement should disturb the exquisite delicacy of the work in course
of accomplishment. Even so, to secure his recovery, is a broken boned
patient held captive in the surgeon's bandages. Absolute stillness is
necessary in both cases, lest they be crippled or even die.

Well, here, by a strange inversion that confuses all our views on life,
a Cyclopean task is laid upon the nymph of the Anthrax. It is the nymph
that has to toil, to strive, to exhaust itself in efforts to burst the
wall and open the way out. To t