Chapter 11

The cunning anatomist has now successively laid bare all the springs of the animal intellect; he has shown how the various movements are mutually combined and engaged. But so far we have seen only one of the faces of the little mind of the animal; let us now consider the other aspect, the moral side, the region of feeling, the problem of which is confounded with the problem of instinct, and is doubtless fundamentally only another aspect of the same elemental power.

After the conflict the insect manifests its delight; it seems sometimes to exult in its triumph; "beside the caterpillar which it has just stabbed with its sting, and which lies writhing on the ground," the Ammophila "stamps, gesticulates, beats her wings," capers about, sounding victory in an intoxication of delight.

The sense of property exists in a high degree among the Mason-bees; with them right comes before might, and "the intruder is always finally dislodged." (10/1.)

But can we find in the insect anything analogous to what we term devotion, attachment, affectionate feeling? There are facts which lead us to believe we may.

Let us go once more into Fabre's garden and admire the Thomisus: absorbed in her maternal function, the little spider lying flat on her nest can strive no longer and is wasting away, but persists in living, mere ruin that she is, in order to open the door to her family with one last bite. Feeling under the silken roof her offspring stamping with impatience, but knowing that they have not strength to liberate themselves, she perforates the capsule, making a sort of practicable skylight. This duty accomplished, she quietly surrenders to death, still grappled to her nest.

The Psyche, dominated by a kind of unconscious necessity, protects her nursery by means of her body, anchors herself upon the threshold, and perishes there, devoted to her family even in death.

However, Fabre will show us with infallible logic that all these instances of foresight and maternal tenderness have, as a rule, no other motive than pleasure and the blind impulse which urges the insect to follow only the fatal path of its instincts.

In many species the material fact of maternity is reduced to its simplest expression.

The Pieris limits herself to depositing her eggs on the leaves of the cabbage, "on which the young must themselves find food and shelter."

"From the height of the topmost clusters of the centaury the Clythris negligently lets her eggs fall to the ground, one by one, here or there at hazard; without the least care as to their installation.

"The eggs of the Locustidae are implanted in the earth like seeds and germinate like grain."

But stop before the Lycosa, that magnificent type of maternal love which Fabre has already depicted. "She broods over her eggs with anxious affection. With the hinder claws resting on the margin of the well she holds herself supported above the opening of the white sac, which is swollen with eggs. For several long weeks she exposes it to the sun during half the day. Gently she turns it about in order to present every side to the vivifying light. The bird, in order to hatch her eggs, covers them with the down of her breast, and presses them against that living calorifer, her heart. The Lycosa turns hers about beneath the fires of heaven; she gives them the sun for incubator." (10.2.) Could abnegation be more perfect? What greater proof could there be of renunciation and self-oblivion?

But appearances are vain. Substitute for the beloved sac some other object, and the spider "will turn about, with the same love, as though it were her sac of eggs, a piece of cork, a pincushion, or a ball of paper," just as the hen, another victim of this sublime deception, will give all her heart to hatching the china nest-eggs which have been placed beneath her, and for weeks will forget to feed.

The young brood hatches, and the spider goes a-hunting, carrying her little ones on her back; she protects them in case of danger, but is incapable of recognizing them or of distinguishing them from the young of others. The Copris and the Scorpion are no less blind, "and their maternal tenderness barely exceeds that of the plant, which, a stranger to any sense of affection or morality, none the less exercises the most exquisite care in respect of its seeds."

Moreover, the impulse to work is only a kind of unconscious pleasure. When the Pelopaeus "has stored her lair with game," when the Cerceris has sealed the crypt to which she has confided the future of her race, neither one nor the other can foresee "the future offspring which their faceted eyes will never behold, and the very object of their labours is to them occult."

With them, as with all, life can only be a perpetual illusion.

Yet the marvellous edifice of the "Souvenirs entomologiques" is consummated by the astonishing history of the Minotaur, whose habits surpass in ideal beauty all that could be imagined.

At the bottom of a burrow, in a deeply sunken vault, two dung-beetles are at work, the Minotaurs, who, once united, recognize one another, and can find one another again if separated, but do not voluntarily separate, realizing "the moral beauty of the double life" and "the touching concept of the family, the sacred group par excellence." The male buries himself with his companion, remains faithful to her, comes to her assistance, and "stores up treasure for the future. Never discouraged by the heavy labour of climbing, leaving to the mother only the more moderate labour, keeping the severest for himself, the heavy task of transport in a narrow tunnel, very deep and almost vertical, he goes foraging, forgetful of himself, heedless of the intoxicating delights of spring, though it would be so good to see something of the country, to feast with his brothers, and to pester the neighbours; but no! he collects the food which is to nourish his children, and then, when all is ready for the new-comers, when their living is assured, having spent himself without counting the cost, exhausted by his efforts, and feeling himself failing, he leaves his home and goes away to die, that he may not pollute the dwelling with a corpse."

The mother, on her side, allows nothing to divert her from her household, and only returns to the surface when accompanied by her young, who disperse at will. Then, having nothing more to do, the devoted creature perishes in turn. (10/3.)

Compared with the Scarabaeus, which contents itself with idle wandering, or even with the meritorious Sisyphus, does it not seem that the Minotaur moves on an infinitely higher plane?

What nobler could be found among ourselves? What father ever better comprehended his duties and obligations toward his family? What morality could be more irreproachable; what fairer example could be meditated?

"Is not life everywhere the same, in the body of the dung-beetle as in that of man? If we examine it in the insect, do we not examine it in ourselves?"

Whence does the Minotaur derive these particular graces? How has it risen to so high a level on the wings of pure instinct? How could we explain the rarity of so sublime an example, did we not know, to satiety, that "nature everywhere is but an enigmatic poem, as who should say a veiled and misty picture, shining with an infinite variety of deceptive lights in order to evoke our conjectures"? (10/4.)

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the majority have no other rule of conduct than to follow the trend of their instincts, and to obey "their unbridled desires." No one better than Fabre has expounded the blind operation of these little natural forces, the brutality of their manners, their cannibalism, and what we might call their amorality, were it possible to employ our human formulae outside our own human world.

With the gardener-beetles, if one is crippled, none of the same race halts or lingers; none attempts to come to his aid. Sometimes the passers-by hasten to the invalid to devour him."

In the republic of the wasps "the grubs recognized as incurable are pitilessly torn from their place and dragged out of the nest. Woe to the sick! they are helpless and at once expelled."

When the winter comes all the larvae are massacred, and the whole vespine city ends in a horrible tragedy.

But life is a whole, and all conduct is good whose actions realize an object and are adapted to an end. If there is a "spirit" of the hive, the insect also has its morality and the wasp's nest its "law," and the conduct of its inmates, horrible though it may seem to Fabre, is doubtless only a submission to certain exigencies of that universal law which makes nature a "savage foster-mother who knows nothing of pity."

These cruelties particularly show us that one of the functions of the insect in nature is to preside over the disappearance and also the ultimate metamorphoses of the least "remnants of life."

Each has its providential hygienic function.

The Necrophori, "the first of the tiny scavengers of the fields," bury corpses in order to establish their progeny in them; in the space of a few hours an enormous body, a mole, a water-rat, or an adder, will completely disappear, buried under the earth.

The Onthophagi purify the soil, "dividing all filth into tiny crumbs, ridding the earth of its defilements."

A very small beetle, the Trox, has the imprescriptible mission of purging the earth of the rabbits' fur rejected by the fox. (10/5.)

Here structure explains the function.

The intestine of the grub of the rose-beetle "is a veritable triturating mill, which transforms vegetable matter into mould; in a month it will digest a volume of matter equal to several thousand times the initial volume of the grub."

The intestine of the Scarabaei is prolonged to a prodigious length in order to "drain the excrement to the last atom in its manifold circuits. The sheep has finely divided the vegetable matter; the grub, that incomparable triturator, reduces it to the finest possible consistency; not a morsel is left in which the magnifying glass can reveal a fibre."

To fulfil its hygienic mission the insect arrives in due season, and multiplies its legions; "there are twenty thousand eggs in the flanks of the house fly; immediately they are hatched these twenty thousand maggots set to work, so that Linnaeus has said that three flies would suffice to devour the body of a horse or a lion."

Feeding only upon wheat, a single weevil, the Calendar beetle, produces ten thousand eggs, whence issue as many larvae, each of them devouring its grain.

In all species the number of births is at first exaggerated, for all, the obscure, the nameless, the most destructive, our pests as well as our most precious helpers, have their utility and their part to play in the general scheme of life, a raison d'être in the eternal renewal of things, which is without reference to the vexatious or beneficent quality of their behaviour to us.

Each has its rank assigned, each has its task, to one the flower, to another the roots, to a third the leaves; the vine has its caterpillars, its beetles, its butterflies; the clover, its moths and mites. (10/6.)

Man sees himself forced to submit to them, and spends himself in vain efforts to carry on an often useless campaign. Nothing seems to affect them, neither drought, nor rain, nor even the severest cold; and the eggs and larvae, organizations apparently delicate in the extreme, are often more tenacious of life than the adults. Fabre has proved this: let the temperature suddenly fall twenty degrees: the eggs of Geotrupes and the larvae of the cockchafer or the rose-beetle endure such vicissitudes of temperature with impunity; contracted and stiffened into little masses of ice, but not destroyed, they revive in spring no less than the eel fry, the rotifers, or the tardigrades. One can scarcely believe that life still persists in a state of suspense only in these little frozen creatures, whose organization is already so complicated.

Then, of a sudden, the ravagers disappear; more often than not none knows how or why; deliverance is at hand. What indeed would become of the world were nothing to moderate such fecundity?

Again, each species has its trials which appear in time to moderate its surplusage, and Fabre expounds for us, with a stern philosophy, the terrible devices by which this repression is effected.

Each has its appointed enemy, which lives upon it or its offspring, and which in turn becomes the prey of some smaller creature. The gentle itself, "the king of the dead," has its parasites. While it swims in the deliquescence of putrefying flesh a minute Chalcidian perforates its skin with an imperceptible wound, and introduces its terrible eggs, whence in the future will issue larvae which to-morrow will devour the devourers of to-day.

None exists save to the detriment of others. Everywhere, even in the smallest, we find "an atrocious activity, a cunning brigandage," a savage extermination, which dominates a vast unconscious world of which the final result is the restoration of equilibrium. (10/7.) It is only on these antagonisms, on the enemies of our enemies, that we can found any hope of seeing this or that pest disappear. A small Hymenopteron, almost invisible, the Microgaster glomeratus, is entrusted with the destruction of the cabbage caterpillar; the cochineal wages war to the death upon the green- fly; the Ammophila is the predestined murderer of the harvest Noctuela, whose misdeeds in a beetroot country often amount to a disaster. The Odynerus has for its instinctive mission to arrest the excessive multiplication of a lucerne weevil, no less than twenty-four of whose grubs are necessary to rear the offspring of the brigand, and nearly sixty gadflies are sacrificed to the growth of a single Bembex.

Everywhere craft is organized to triumph over force. Around each nest the parasites lie in wait, "atrocious assassins of the child in the cradle, watching at the doors for the favourable occasion to establish their family at the expense of others. The enemy penetrates the most inaccessible fortress; each has its tactics of war, devised with a terrible art. Of the nest and the cocoon of the victim the intruder makes its own nest, its own cocoon, and in the following year, instead of the master of the house, he will emerge from underground as the usurping bandit, the devourer of the inhabitant."

While the cicada is absorbed in laying her eggs an insignificant fly labours to destroy them. How express the calm audacity of this pigmy, following closely after the colossus, step by step; several at once almost under the talons of the giant, which could crush them merely by treading on them? But the cicada respects them, or they would long ago have disappeared." (10/8.)

Fabre thus agrees with Pasteur, who in the world of the infinitely little shows us the same antagonisms, the same vital competition, the same eternal movement of flux and reflux, the same whirlpool of life, which is extinguished only to reappear: tending always towards an equilibrium which is incessantly destroyed. And it is thanks to this balancing that the integral of life remains everywhere and always almost identical with itself.