f its stomach; many of the
minutest new-born creatures, being at once left to their own devices,
take to animal food. In this way the original method of nourishment is
continued for all alike: the method which allows flesh to be made from
flesh and blood from blood, with no chemical process beyond the simplest
modification. At maturity, when the stomach has acquired its full
strength, vegetable food is adopted, involving a more complicated
chemistry but easier to obtain. Milk is followed by fodder, worms by
seeds, the prey in the burrow by the nectar of the flowers.

This supplies a partial explanation of the twofold diet of the
Hymenoptera with carnivorous larvae: meat first, honey next. But then
the note of interrogation is shifted. It stood elsewhere; it now stands
here. Why is the Osmia, who as a larva fares so well on albumen, fed on
honey at the start? Why do the Bee-tribe receive a vegetable diet when
the other members of the order receive an animal diet?

If I were a believer in evolution, I should say yes, by the fact of its
germ, every animal is originally carnivorous. The insect in particular
starts with albuminoid materials. Many larvae adhere to the egg-food,
many adult insects do likewise. But the struggle to fill the belly,
which after all is the struggle for life, demands something better than
the precarious hazards of the chase. Man, at first a ravenous hunter
after game, brought the flock into existence and turned shepherd to
avoid a time of dearth. An even greater progress inspired him to scrape
the earth and to sow seed, which assures him of a living. The evolution
from scarcity to moderation and from moderation to plenty has led to the
resources of husbandry.

The animals forestalled us this path of progress. The ancestors of the
Philanthus, in the remote ages of the lacustrian tertiary formations,
lived by prey in both the larval and the adult forms: they hunted for
themselves as well as for the family. They did not confine themselves
to emptying the Bee's crop, as their descendants do to this day: they
devoured the deceased. From the beginning to the end they remained
flesh-eaters. Later, fortunate innovators, whose race supplanted the
laggards, discovered an inexhaustible nourishment, obtained without
dangerous conflicts or laborious search: the sugary secretions of the
flowers. The costly habit of living on prey, which does not favour large
populations, was maintained for the feeble larvae; bu