onger, is furrowed with powerful folds and bristles with
grappling-hooks or hairs; and gradually, by adaptation to its
environment, the creature loses the art of walking, which it does not
practise, and replaces it by that of crawling on its back, a form of
progress better suited to underground corridors.

So far so good. But now tell me, if you please, why the larvae of the
Oryctes and the Scarabaeus, living in vegetable mould, the larva of the
Anoxia, dwelling in the sand, and the larva of the Cockchafer in our
cultivated fields have not also acquired the faculty of walking on their
backs? In their galleries they follow the chimney-sweep's methods quite
as cleverly as the Cetonia-grub; to move forward they make valiant use
of their backs without yet having come to ambling with their bellies
in the air. Can they have neglected to accommodate themselves to the
demands of their environment? If evolution and environment cause the
topsy-turvy progress of the one, I have the right, if words have
any meaning whatever, to demand as much of the others, since their
organization is so much alike and their mode of life identical.

I have but little respect for theories which, when confronted with two
similar cases, are unable to interpret the one without contradicting the
other. They make me laugh when they become merely childish. For
example: why has the tiger a coat streaked black and yellow? A matter of
environment, replies one of our evolutionary masters. Ambushed in bamboo
thickets where the golden radiance of the sun is intersected by stripes
of shadow cast by the foliage, the animal, the better to conceal itself,
assumed the colour of its environment. The rays of the sun produced the
tawny yellow of the coat; the stripes of shadow added the black bars.

And there you have it. Any one who refuses to accept the explanation
must be very hard to please. I am one of these difficult persons. If it
were a dinner-table jest, made over the walnuts and the wine, I would
willingly sing ditto; but alas and alack, it is uttered without a
smile, in a solemn and magisterial manner, as the last word in science!
Toussenel, in his day, asked the naturalists an insidious question.
(Alphonse Toussenel (1803-1885), the author of a number of learned and
curious works on ornithology.--Translator's Note.) Why, he enquired,
have Ducks a little curly feather on the rump? No one, so far as I know,
had an answer for the teasing cross-examiner: evolu