to any eye untrained in the niceties of botanical analysis.

She did more: she browsed, with every appearance of a contented
stomach, on a prickly creeper, _Smilax aspera_, which tangles itself
in the hedges with its corkscrew tendrils and produces, in the autumn,
graceful clusters of small red berries, which are used for Christmas
decorations. The fully-developed leaves are too hard for her, too
tough; she wants the tender tips of the nascent foliage. When I take
this precaution, I can feed her on the intractable vine as readily as
on the lily.

The fact that the smilax is accepted gives me confidence in the
prickly butcher's-broom (_Ruscus aculeatus_), another shrub of sturdy
constitution, admitted to the family rejoicings at Christmas because
of its handsome green leaves and its red berries, which are like big
coral beads. In order not to discourage the consumer with leaves that
are too hard, I select some young seedlings, newly sprouted and still
bearing the round berry, the nutritive gourd, hanging at their base.
My precautions lead to nothing: the insect obstinately refuses the
butcher's-broom, on which I thought that I might rely after the smilax
had been accepted.

We have our botany; the Crioceris has hers, which is subtler in its
appreciation of affinities. Her domain comprises two very natural
groups, that of the lily and that of the smilax, which, with the
advance of science, has become the family of the Smilaceae. In these
two groups she recognizes certain genera--the more numerous--as her
own; she refuses the others, which ought perhaps to be revised before
being finally classified.

An exclusive taste for the asparagus, one of the foremost
representatives of the Smilaceae, characterizes the two other
Crioceres, those eager exploiters of the cultivated asparagus. I find
them also pretty often on the needle-leaved asparagus (_A.
acutifolius_), a forbidding-looking shrub with long, flexible stems
bearing many branches, which the Provencal vine-grower uses, under the
name of _roumieu_, as a filter before the tap of the wine-vat, to
prevent the refuse of the grapes from choking up the vent-hole. Apart
from these two plants, the two Crioceres refuse absolutely everything,
even when in July they come up from the earth with the famishing
stomachs which the long fast of the metamorphosis has given them. On
the same wild asparagus, disdainful of the rest, lives a fourth
Crioceris (_C. paracenthesia_), the smal