her, tinier creature feasts in company.
Twenty or more of them batten on the grub together.

When everything seems to foretell a quiet life, a pigmy among pigmies
appears, charged with the express duty of exterminating an insect
which is protected first by the casket of the berry and next by the
shell, the underground work of the grub. To eat the Twelve-spotted
Crioceris is its mission in life, its special function. When and how
does it deliver its attack? I do not know.

At any rate, proud of her vocation and finding life sweet, the Chalcid
curls her antennae into a crook and waves them to and fro: she rubs
her tarsi together, a sign of satisfaction; she dusts her belly. I can
hardly see her with the naked eye; and yet she is an agent of the
universal extermination, a wheel in the implacable machine which
crushes life as in a wine-press.

The tyranny of the belly turns the world into a robber's cave. Eating
means killing. Distilled in the alembic of the stomach, the life
destroyed by slaughter becomes so much fresh life. Everything is
melted down again, everything has a fresh beginning in death's
insatiable furnace.

Man, from the alimentary point of view, is the chief brigand,
consuming everything that lives or might live. Here is a mouthful of
bread, the sacred food. It represents a certain number of grains of
wheat which asked only to sprout, to turn green in the sun, to shoot
up into tall stalks crowned with ears. They died that we might live.
Here are some eggs. Left undisturbed with the Hen, they would have
emitted the Chickens' gentle cheep. They died that we might live. Here
is beef, mutton, poultry. Horror, it smells of blood, it is eloquent
of murder! If we gave it a thought, we should not dare to sit down to
table, that altar of cruel sacrifices.

How many lives does the Swallow, to mention only the most peaceable,
harvest in the course of a single day! From morning to evening he
gulps down Crane-flies, Gnats and Midges joyously dancing in the
sunbeams. Quick as lightning he passes; and the dancers are decimated.
They perish; then their melancholy remnants fall from the nest
containing the young brood, in the form of guano which becomes the
turf's inheritance. And so it is with all and everything, with large
and small, from end to end of the animal progression. A perpetual
massacre perpetuates the flux of life.

Appalled by these butcheries, the thinker begins to dream of a state
of affairs which wou