al sleep with its head at the back of the cell, the
Capricorn is infallibly lost: his cradle becomes a hopeless dungeon.

But there is no fear of this danger: the knowledge of the bit of an
intestine is too sound in things of the future for the grub to neglect
the formality of keeping its head to the door. At the end of spring,
the Capricorn, now in possession of his full strength, dreams of the
joys of the sun, of the festivals of light. He wants to get out. What
does he find before him? A heap of filings easily dispersed with his
claws; next, a stone lid which he need not even break into fragments:
it comes undone in one piece; it is removed from its frame with a few
pushes of the forehead, a few tugs of the claws. In fact, I find the
lid intact on the threshold of the abandoned cells. Last comes a
second mass of woody remnants as easy to disperse as the first. The
road is now free: the Cerambyx has but to follow the spacious
vestibule, which will lead him, without the possibility of mistake, to
the exit. Should the window not be open, all that he has to do is to
gnaw through a thin screen: an easy task; and behold him outside, his
long antennae aquiver with excitement.

What have we learnt from him? Nothing from him; much from his grub.
This grub, so poor in sensory organs, gives us with its prescience no
little food for reflection. It knows that the coming Beetle will not
be able to cut himself a road through the oak and it bethinks itself
of opening one for him at its own risk and peril. It knows that the
Cerambyx, in his stiff armour, will never be able to turn and make for
the orifice of the cell; and it takes care to fall into its nymphal
sleep with its head to the door. It knows how soft the pupa's flesh
will be and upholsters the bedroom with velvet. It knows that the
enemy is likely to break in during the slow work of the transformation
and, to set a bulwark against his attacks, it stores a calcium pap
inside its stomach. It knows the future with a clear vision, or, to be
accurate, behaves as though it knew the future. Whence did it derive
the motives of its actions? Certainly not from the experience of the
senses. What does it know of the outside world? Let us repeat, as much
as a bit of an intestine can know. And this sense-less creature
astounds us! I regret that the clever logician, instead of conceiving
a statue smelling a rose, did not imagine it gifted with some
instinct. How quickly he would have rec