subject others to less arduous tests. I enclose them in
spacious reed-stumps, equal in diameter to the natal cell. The
obstacle to be pierced is the natural diaphragm, a yielding partition
two or three millimetres[6] thick. Some free themselves; others
cannot. The less valiant ones succumb, stopped by the frail barrier.
What would it be if they had to pass through a thickness of oak?

[Footnote 5: Cf. _The Life and Love of the Insect_: chap. iii. "The
tool does not make the workman. The insect exerts its gifts as a
specialist with any kind of tool wherewith it is supplied. It can saw
with a plane or plane with a saw, like the model workman of whom
Franklin tells us."--_Translator's Note_.]

[Footnote 6: .078 to .117 inch.--_Translator's Note_.]

We are now persuaded: despite his stalwart appearance, the Capricorn
is powerless to leave the tree-trunk by his unaided efforts. It
therefore falls to the worm, to the wisdom of that bit of an
intestine, to prepare the way for him. We see renewed, in another
form, the feats of prowess of the Anthrax, whose pupa, armed with
trepans, bores through rock on the feeble Fly's behalf. Urged by a
presentiment that to us remains an unfathomable mystery, the
Cerambyx-grub leaves the inside of the oak, its peaceful retreat, its
unassailable stronghold, to wriggle towards the outside, where lives
the foe, the Woodpecker, who may gobble up the succulent little
sausage. At the risk of its life, it stubbornly digs and gnaws to the
very bark, of which it leaves no more intact than the thinnest film, a
slender screen. Sometimes, even, the rash one opens the window wide.

This is the Capricorn's doorway. The insect will have but to file the
screen a little with its mandibles, to bump against it with its
forehead, in order to bring it down; it will even have nothing to do
when the window is free, as often happens. The unskilled carpenter,
burdened with his extravagant head-dress, will emerge from the
darkness through this opening when the summer heats arrive.

After the cares of the future come the cares of the present. The
larva, which has just opened the aperture of escape, retreats some
distance down its gallery and, in the side of the exit-way, digs
itself a transformation-chamber more sumptuously furnished and
barricaded than any that I have ever seen. It is a roomy niche, shaped
like a flattened ellipsoid, the length of which reaches some eighty to
a hundred millimetres.[7] The two axe