ld free us from the horrors of the maw. This ideal
of innocence, as our poor nature vaguely sees it, is not an
impossibility; it is partly realized for all of us, men and animals.

Breathing is the most imperious of needs. We live by the air before we
live by bread; and this happens of itself, without painful struggles,
without costly labour, almost without our knowledge. We do not set
out, armed for war, to conquer the air by rapine, violence, cunning,
barter and desperate labour; the supreme element of life enters our
bodies of its own accord; it penetrates us and quickens us. Each of us
has his generous share of it without giving the matter a thought.

To crown perfection, it is free. And this will last indefinitely until
an ever ingenious Treasury invents distributing-taps and pneumatic
receivers from which the air will be doled out to us at so much a
piston-stroke. Let us hope that we shall be spared this particular
item of scientific progress, for that, woe betide us, would be the end
of all things: the tax would kill the tax-payer!

Chemistry, in its lighter moods, promises us, in the future, pills
containing the concentrated essence of food. These cunning compounds,
the product of our laboratories, would not end our longing to possess
a stomach no more burdensome than our lungs and to feed even as we
breathe.

The plant partly knows this secret: it draws its carbon quietly from
the air, in which each leaf is impregnated with the wherewithal to
grow tall and green. But the vegetable is inactive; hence its innocent
life. Action calls for strongly flavoured spices, won by fighting. The
animal acts; therefore it kills. The highest phase, perhaps, of a
self-conscious intelligence, man, deserving nothing better, shares
with the brute the tyranny of the belly as the irresistible motive of
action.

But I have wandered too far afield. A living speck, swarming in the
paunch of a grub, tells us of the brigandage of life. How well it
understands its trade as an exterminator! In vain does the
Crioceris-larva take refuge in an unassailable casket: its executioner
makes herself so small that she is able to reach it.

Adopt such precautions as you please, you pitiable grubs, pose on your
sprigs in the attitude of a threatening Sphinx, take refuge in the
mysteries of a box, arm yourself with a cuirass of dung: you will none
the less pay your tribute in the pitiless conflict; there will always
be operators who, varying in