Social Life in the Insect World Part 24

But so be it: you have really prepared protoplasm. By force of meditation, profound study, minute care, impregnable patience, your desire is realised: you have extracted from your apparatus an alb.u.minous slime, easily corruptible and stinking like the devil at the end of a few days: in short, a nastiness. What are you going to do with it?

Organise something? Will you give it the structure of a living edifice?

Will you inject it with a hypodermic syringe between two impalpable plates to obtain were it only the wing of a fly?

That is very much what the locust does. It injects its protoplasm between the two surfaces of an embryo organ, and the material forms a wing-cover, because it finds as guide the ideal archetype of which I spoke but now. It is controlled in the labyrinth of its course by a device anterior to the injection: anterior to the material itself.

This archetype, the co-ordinator of forms; this primordial regulator; have you got it on the end of your syringe? No! Then throw away your product. Life will never spring from that chemical filth.

CHAPTER XXI

THE PINE-CHAFER

The orthodox denomination of this insect is _Melolontha fullo_, Lin. It does not answer, I am very well aware, to be difficult in matters of nomenclature; make a noise of some sort, affix a Latin termination, and you will have, as far as euphony goes, the equivalent of many of the tickets pasted in the entomologist's specimen boxes. The cacophony would be excusable if the barbarous term signified nothing but the creature signified; but as a rule this name possesses, hidden in its Greek or other roots, a certain meaning in which the novice hopes to find instruction.

The hope is a delusion. The learned term refers to subtleties difficult to comprehend, and of very indifferent importance. Too often it leads the student astray, giving him glimpses that have nothing whatever in common with the truth as we know it from observation. Very often the errors implied by such names are flagrant; sometimes the allusions are ridiculous, grotesque, or merely imbecile. So long as they have a decent sound, how infinitely preferable are locutions in which etymology finds nothing to dissect! Of such would be the word _fullo_, were it not that it already has a meaning which immediately occurs to the mind. This Latin expression means a _fuller_; a person who kneads and presses cloth under a stream of water, making it flexible and ridding it of the asperities of weaving. What connection has the subject of this chapter with the fuller of cloth? I may puzzle my head in vain: no acceptable reply will occur to me.

The term _fullo_ as applied to an insect is found in Pliny. In one chapter the great naturalist treats of remedies against jaundice, fevers, and dropsy. A little of everything enters into this antique pharmacy: the longest tooth of a black dog; the nose of a mouse wrapped in a pink cloth; the right eye of a green lizard torn from the living animal and placed in a bag of kid-skin; the heart of a serpent, cut out with the left hand; the four articulations of the tail of a scorpion, including the dart, wrapped tightly in a black cloth, so that for three days the sick man can see neither the remedy nor him that applies it; and a number of other extravagances. We may well close the book, alarmed at the slough of the imbecility whence the art of healing has come down to us.

In the midst of these imbecilities, the preludes of medicine, we find a mention of the "fuller." _Tertium qui vocatur fullo, albis guttis, dissectum utrique lacerto adalligant_, says the text. To treat fevers divide the fuller beetle in two parts and apply half under the right arm and half under the left.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE PINE-CHAFER.

(_Melolontha fullo._)]

Now what did the ancient naturalist mean by the term "fuller beetle"? We do not precisely know. The qualification _albis guttis_, white spots, would fit the Pine-chafer well enough, but it is not sufficient to make us certain. Pliny himself does not seem to have been very certain of the ident.i.ty of the remedy. In his time men's eyes had not yet learned to see the insect world. Insects were too small; they were well enough for amusing children, who would tie them to the end of a long thread and make them walk in circles, but they were not worthy of occupying the attention of a self-respecting man.

Pliny apparently derived the word from the country-folk, always poor observers and inclined to extravagant denominations. The scholar accepted the rural locution, the work perhaps of the imagination of childhood, and applied it at hazard without informing himself more particularly. The word came down to us embalmed with age; our modern naturalists have accepted it, and thus one of our handsomest insects has become the "fuller." The majesty of antiquity has consecrated the strange appellation.

In spite of all my respect for the antique, I cannot myself accept the term "fuller," because under the circ.u.mstances it is absurd. Common sense should be considered before the aberrations of nomenclature. Why not call our subject the Pine-chafer, in reference to the beloved tree, the paradise of the insect during the two or three weeks of its aerial life? Nothing could be simpler, or more appropriate, to give the better reason last.

We have to wander for ages in the night of absurdity before we reach the radiant light of the truth. All our sciences witness to this fact; even the science of numbers. Try to add a column of Roman figures; you will abandon the task, stupefied by the confusion of symbols; and will recognise what a revolution was made in arithmetic by the discovery of the zero. Like the egg of Columbus, it was a very little thing, but it had to be thought of.

While hoping that the future will sink the unfortunate "fuller" in oblivion, we will use the term "pine chafer" between ourselves. Under that name no one can possibly mistake the insect in question, which frequents the pine-tree only.

It has a handsome and dignified appearance, rivalling that of _Oryctes nasicornis_. Its costume, if it has not the metallic splendour dear to the Scarabaei, the Buprestes and the rose-beetles, is at least unusually elegant. A black or chestnut background is thickly sown with capriciously shaped spots of white velvet; a fas.h.i.+on both modest and handsome.

The male bears at the end of his short antennae a kind of plume consisting of seven large superimposed plates or leaves, which, opening and closing like the sticks of a fan, betray the emotions that possess him. At first sight it seems that this magnificent foliage must form a sense-organ of great perfection, capable of perceiving subtle odours, or almost inaudible vibrations of the air, or other phenomena to which our senses fail to respond; but the female warns us that we must not place too much reliance on such ideas; for although her maternal duties demand a degree of impressionability at least as great as that of the male, yet the plumes of her antennae are extremely meagre, containing only six narrow leaves.

What then is the use of the enormous fan-like structure of the male antennae? The seven-leaved apparatus is for the Pine-chafer what his long vibrating horns are to the Cerambyx and the panoply of the head to the Onthophagus and the forked antlers of the mandibles to the Stag-beetle.

Each decks himself after his manner in these nuptial extravagances.

This handsome chafer appears towards the summer solstice, almost simultaneously with the first Cigales. The punctuality of its appearance gives it a place in the entomological calendar, which is no less punctual than that of the seasons. When the longest days come, those days which seem endless and gild the harvests, it never fails to hasten to its tree. The fires of St. John, reminiscences of the festivals of the Sun, which the children light in the village streets, are not more punctual in their date.

At this season, in the hours of twilight, the Pine-chafer comes every evening if the weather is fine, to visit the pine-trees in the garden. I follow its evolutions with my eyes. With a silent flight, not without spirit, the males especially wheel and wheel about, extending their great antennary plumes; they go to and fro, to and fro, a procession of flying shadows upon the pale blue of the sky in which the last light of day is dying. They settle, take flight again, and once more resume their busy rounds. What are they doing up there during the fortnight of their festival?

The answer is evident: they are courting their mates, and they continue to render their homage until the fall of night. In the morning both males and females commonly occupy the lower branches. They lie there isolated, motionless, indifferent to pa.s.sing events. They do not avoid the hand about to seize them. Most of them are hanging by their hind legs and nibbling the pine-needles; they seem to be gently drowsing with the needles at their mouths. When twilight returns they resume their frolics.

To watch these frolics in the tops of the trees is hardly possible; let us try to observe them in captivity. Four pairs are collected in the morning and placed, with some twigs off the pine-tree, in a s.p.a.cious; cage. The sight is hardly worth my attention; deprived of the possibility of flight, the insects cannot behave as in the open. At most I see a male from time to time approaching his beloved; he spreads out the leaves of his antennae, and agitates them so that they s.h.i.+ver slightly; he is perhaps informing himself if he is welcome. Thereupon he puts on his finest airs and exhibits his attainments. It is a useless display; the female is motionless, as though insensible to these demonstrations. Captivity has sorrows that are hard to overcome. This was all that I was able to see. Mating, it appears, must take place during the later hours of the night, so that I missed the propitious moment.

One detail in particular interested me. The Pine-chafer emits a musical note. The female is as gifted as the male. Does the lover make use of his faculty as a means of seduction and appeal? Does the female answer the chirp of her _innamorata_ by a similar chirp? That this may be so under normal conditions, amidst the foliage of the pines, is extremely probable; but I can make no a.s.sertion, as I have never heard anything of the kind either among the pines or in my laboratory.

The sound is produced by the extremity of the abdomen, which gently rises and falls, rubbing, as it does so, with its last few segments, the hinder edge of the wing-covers, which are held firm and motionless.

There is no special equipment on the rubbing surface nor on the surface rubbed. The magnifying-gla.s.s looks in vain for the fine striations usually found in the musical instruments of the insect world. All is smooth on either hand. How then is the sound engendered?

Rub the end of the moistened finger on a strip of gla.s.s, or a window-pane, and you will obtain a very audible sound, somewhat a.n.a.logous to that emitted by the chafer. Better still, use a sc.r.a.p of indiarubber to rub the gla.s.s with, and you will reproduce with some fidelity the sound in question. If the proper rhythm is observed the imitation is so successful that one might well be deceived by it.

In the musical apparatus of the Pine-chafer the pad of the finger-tip and the sc.r.a.p of indiarubber are represented by the soft abdomen of the insect, and the gla.s.s is represented by the blade of the wing-cover, which forms a thin, rigid plate, easily set in vibration. The sound-mechanism of the Pine-chafer is thus of the very simplest description.

INDEX

A

Acorn-Weevil, _see_ Elephant-Beetle

Ameles, _see_ Mantis, the Grey

Anacreon, on the Cigale, 9

Ant, fable of the Cigale and the, 1-16 Devours the Cigale, 9 Robs the Cigale, 8

Arum, Serpent or Putrid, the, attracts and captures insects by means of its offensive effluvia, 230-2

B

_Balaninus_, _see_ Elephant-Beetle

Bean, ancestry of, 258-9

Bean, _see_ Haricot

Bean-Weevil, _see_ Weevil

Bees, victims of Philanthus, _see_ latter

Bembex, 168, 172

Bolboceras Gallicus, 217-37 Appearance of, 223 Habits and diet, 226-30 Lodging of, 225

_Bruchus pisi_, see Pea-Weevil