THE TEREBINTH-LOUSE: THE GALLS

The Life of the Scorpion by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here . THE TEREBINTH-LOUSE: THE GALLS CHAPTER III. THE TEREBINTH-LOUSE: THE GALLS For curious methods of generation, the Plant-lice bear the palm. Nowhere shall we find anything to beat them unless we pry into the secrets of the sea. We must not look to them for remarkable feats of instinct. The humble, round-bellied Lice are incapable of such achievements; to these stay-at-homes the lifting of a foot spells an excess of emancipation. But they will tell us by what attempts, bewildering in their energy and variety, the universal law that governs the transmission of life has come into being. I shall consult the Terebinth-lice by preference. They are near neighbours of mine, a condition essential to frequent visits; they practise an industry, which is a not uninteresting addition; and they are crowded into sealed enclosures where we can follow the progress of the family without too much confusion.[ ] 243 The shrub that feeds them, the terebinth, or turpentine-tree, abounds on the Sérignan hills. It is sensitive to the cold, a lover of stony wastes scorched by the sun. Its insignificant flowers are succeeded by pretty bunches of little berries, first pink, then blue, smelling of turpentine and beloved by the Redstart when migrating in autumn. Any one seeing it for the first time, unless conversant with its history, might think that it bore yet another crop of fruit, quite different from that of the berries. On the tips of the boughs, singly or in bunches, are certain twisted horns, a fairly good imitation of certain pimentos, if the coral-red of maturity were replaced by a straw-yellow washed with rose. What is more, mimic apricots, fresher and more satiny than those of our orchards, are seen hanging from the leaves. Tempted by appearances, we open these deceptive productions. Horror! The contents consist of myriads of Lice, swarming about in the midst of a floury dust. Pilgrims to the Holy Land tell us that on certain bushes in the neighbourhood of Sodom beautiful-looking apples may be gathered, which are full of ashes within. The [ ]pretty apricots and cornute pimentos of the terebinth-tree are the apples of Sodom, the Dead Sea fruit. Beneath an attractive exterior, they too contain nothing but ashes, live ashes, a wriggling whirl of dusty vermin. These are excrescences, galls, in which the opulent family of the Plant-lice lives isolated from the outer world. 244 To follow the progress of these strange productions I needed a terebinth which I could inspect often and in comfort. I happen to have one a few steps from my door. When I was stocking the enclosure with a certain amount of woody vegetation, I conceived the happy thought of planting a terebinth. A profitable tree, yielding acceptable fruit, would have died in this ungrateful soil; but this, which is good for nothing but firewood, is prospering excellently. It has grown into a magnificent specimen; and year after year it never fails to be covered with galls. So here I am, the fortunate possessor of a tree full of Lice. Let us call it by its Provençal name: lou Petelin, or lou Pesouious, the lousy one. Scarcely a day passes but I give it a glance, attracted as I am by the daily happenings in [ ]the enclosure. Let us examine it closely. The “lousy one” has its merits: it is the depository of interesting secrets. In winter it is bare. With the foliage the wigwams of Lice have disappeared, though towards the end of the summer they were weighing it down with their numbers. Nothing is left but the horn-shaped shells, now black and dilapidated ruins. 245 What has become of the vast population of the bush? How will it recover possession of its terebinth? In vain I inspect the bark of the trunk and branches and twigs: I see nothing capable of explaining the coming invasion. Nowhere are there any lice in a state of lethargy, nowhere any eggs awaiting the spring hatching. Nor are there any in the neighbourhood, nor, in particular, in the heap of dead leaves rotting at the foot of the tree. Yet the tiny creature cannot come from a distance: a mere atom, as I see it in imagination, does not go wandering across country. It is certainly on the tree that feeds it; but where? One day in January, weary of my futile search, it occurs to me to strip off, in shreds, a lichen, the Wall Parmelia, which here [ ]and there carpets thinly with its yellow rosettes the base and the thicker branches of my terebinth. I examine my harvest through the lens, in my study. What is this? 246 A magnificent discovery! In my scrap of lichen, no larger than a finger-nail, I discover a world. On the inner surface, in the winding crevices between the scales, are encrusted vast numbers of tiny red bodies barely a millimetre in length. Some of them are entire and oval in shape; some, truncated and empty, display open pouches with pointed ends. All are plainly segmented. 1 Can it be that I have before my eyes the Louse’s eggs, of which some are old and empty, while others are recent and contain their germ? This idea is soon disposed of: an egg has not this segmentation like that of an insect’s abdomen. Here is a more significant fact: a head and antennæ are visible in front, while legs may be seen underneath; the whole is dry and brittle. These specks, accordingly, once lived and walked. Are they dead now? No, for when I crush them with the point of a needle traces of [ ]moisture gush forth, a sign of a living organism. Only the shell is dead. 247 The tiny creature, capable at first of movement, endowed with legs and antennæ, wandered for some time under cover of the lichen; then, before it became inert, it settled down on a suitable spot. There it turned its shrivelled skin, now an amber-coloured pellicle, into a mummy’s sarcophagus in which the organism makes ready for a new life. When the time comes, we shall discover the origin of this curious object, which was an animal and now deserves the name of egg. What my own familiar terebinth has shown me in the enclosure, I ought to see repeated in the open country. Sure enough, I do see it; but this time it is not under lichens, for the bark of the tree is most often bare. There is no lack of other shelter. Some twigs of terebinth have been cut by the clumsy bill-hooks of the brushwood-gleaners, leaving a ragged section. The wood is split into deep fissures; the loose bark comes away in tatters. Once dry, these ruins are a mine of wealth. In the narrowest crevices, in the cracks of [ ]the wood and under the splintered bark, there are great numbers of the atoms that interest me so greatly. To judge by their colour there are at least two kinds. Some are red; the others are black. These latter were scarce under the lichens on my terebinth; here they predominate largely. I collect some of both kinds. And now we must have patience. I have hopes that the answer to the riddle will be found. 248 Mid-April comes and the little glass tubes in which I store my animal seeds are full of life. The black germs are the first to hatch; a fortnight later the red ones follow suit. The epidermic boxes undergo a process of self-mutilation, the front part falling off and leaving a gaping void, without other change of form. A minute animal comes out of them, a black speck in which the lens recognizes a very shapely little Louse, bearing the regulation sucker pressed against its thorax. My first thoughts were correct: the puzzling little red and black bodies found under the lichens and in the cracks of dead wood were really Louse-seeds. And these seeds, judging by their husks, endowed with a head and legs, are little insects, [ ]first active and then inert and converted into germs. The original, almost integral substance is reborn in another shape. The little creature’s skin has provided the shell, the segmented box, a jet-black or amber-yellow pellicule; the rest is concentrated into an egg. 249 The time has not come to observe the singular creature’s origin and behaviour; chronological order forbids. Let us return to the vermin issuing from these germs. They are tiny, tiny little black Lice, with flat abdomens, plainly segmented and as it were granular. Assiduous observation through the lens shows them to be dusted with a touch of blue-grey powder like the bloom on a plum. Trotting with little steps about their spacious prison, the glass tube, they seem uneasy. What do they want? What are they looking for? No doubt, a camping-ground on the friendly tree. I come to their assistance; I place in the tube a twig of terebinth whose buds are beginning to open at the top of their scaly covering. This is the thing they wanted. They climb up the twig, establish themselves in the velvet that clothes the tips of the [ ]buds, and there they settle, calm and satisfied. 250 Direct observations made on the terebinth are accompanied, pari passu, by laboratory experiments. The little black Lice, rare on the 15th of April, are numerous ten days later. On the tip of a single bud I count over twenty of them; and most of the buds are colonized, or at least those that are largest and farthest from the ground. The occupants remain hidden in the scanty down of the nascent follicles whose tips are barely emerging. After a sojourn of some days, when the leaves begin to appear, each insect makes for itself a private dwelling. It exploits, with its sucker, a leaflet whose tip turns purple, swells up and curls over, and, bringing its edges together, forms a flat pocket with an irregular opening. Each of these pockets, about the size of a grain of hemp-seed, is a tent in which a black Plant-louse takes up her residence: one only, never more. What will the little Louse do in her isolated retreat? Feed, and, above all, multiply. If one is to become legion a few months hence, matters brook no delay. [ ]Here, then, there is no father, a mere superfluity and waste of time. So many Lice, so many mothers; no more is needed. Nor is there any laying, for the egg would take too long to develop. Nothing short of direct procreation, unfettered by any preliminaries, is acceptable to the Louse’s ardour. The young are born alive and like their mother, except in point of size. 251 As soon as they are brought into the world, they insert their suckers, absorb a little sap, increase in size, and in a few days become capable of continuing the race by the same rapid method, without fathers. Until the end of the annual colonization the offspring, including the remotest degrees of descent, will maintain the process of genesis by direct parturition and will know no other method. When the time has come for a more convenient examination, we shall return to this amazing method, which completely upsets our ideas. On the 1st of May I open some of the purple swellings which have formed on the tips of the burgeoning leaflets. Sometimes I find the maker of the capsule alone, just as she was on the tips of the buds; sometimes [ ]she has undergone a moult and is accompanied by the beginnings of a family. After discarding her black slough, she has become greenish, corpulent and lightly dusted with flour. Her youngsters, at the moment one or at most two, are brown, slender and bare-skinned. 252 In order to follow the progress of the family, I place under a glass a couple of capsules which so far contain only the founder. Two days later I have a dozen young Lice, who soon desert the natal pocket and make for the cotton-wool closing the glass tube. This hasty migration indicates that the young Lice have their function elsewhere, on the tender, already unfolded leaves. Detached from its fostering support, the little purple cell dries up and its inhabitant dies. My census can no longer be continued. No matter: I have learnt that one day is enough to produce three births. If this birth-rate persists for a fortnight, the maker of the capsule will have brought forth a handsome family, gradually scattered over the wide field of exploitation offered by the terebinth. A fortnight later the red eggs hatch out, when the young twigs are already shooting [ ]and unfolding their leaves. As far as I could judge from my highly unreliable observations of these swarming insects, which are not clearly distinguishable one from the other, the later generation begins as did the earlier. It causes purple nodules to appear on the tips of the leaflets, little wallets similar in shape and size to a grape-stone. Like those already mentioned, these cells are inhabited at first by a single Plant-louse. 253 In both cases the rage for rapid multiplication is the same. The recluses soon produce offspring, who desert the natal shelter and proceed to settle elsewhere as colonists. At last, its flanks drained dry, the viviparous little insect dies in its withered arbour. How many were they, coming from under the lichens and climbing to the assault of the terebinth? There were thousands of them; and this multitude is not enough. Hastily each Louse attacks her leaflet with her beak; she makes herself a lair out of its swollen tip and immediately gives birth to other Lice, multiplying ten- or perhaps a hundredfold in this invasion of the innumerable. The tree has now its full number of colonists, [ ]all capable of founding populous tribes. 254 Are we to regard them as different branches of the same trade union, of the same family, exploiting the terebinth in various fashions, according to the point attacked? We hesitate to regard them as strangers to one another, when they are employed on the same work; yet there are significant reasons for concluding that we have here a duality or multiplicity of species. Besides the disparity of the work accomplished, there is, at the outset, one distinctive feature: the colour of the eggs, of which some are black and others red. These vividly contrasted hues must correspond with independent ancestries. It is even possible that a patient examination, capable of analysing this minute object, would find differences in husks of the same colour. All my own searches beneath patches of lichen and in the crevices of dead wood end in nothing more than the discovery of two sorts of ovular carapaces but of two only, at least to judge by appearances; and yet on the tree we shall find five categories of workers who, though resembling one another, build very dissimilar structures. If there are no other [ ]germs, germs which have escaped my careful observation, it would seem, therefore that the eggs have different contents under an identical shell, whether black or red. 255 Lastly, the configuration, that essential characteristic of the species, displays, in late autumn, very emphatic differentiating features. Up to this late season, the inmates of the galls of every form are so much alike that it is impossible to distinguish them one from another once they are taken from their dwellings. When the final exodus comes, at the close of the year, a generation makes its appearance which differs greatly from its predecessors, giving final proof of multiple species, to the number of five. Their generic name is Pemphigus, which is to say, bubble, capsule, bladder. This scientific name is well deserved. The Terebinth-lice and some others that pursue similar callings, living on the elm and the poplar, are, in a word, artificers of swellings: by the incessant tickling of their suckers they cause the formation of hollow excrescences, which are at once board and lodging to the community. On the terebinth, the simplest of these [ ]dwellings consists of a lateral fold of the leaf, the edge of which is turned back over the upper surface and fastened to it without losing its green colour. This hem gives a very low-roofed dwelling: the floor and the ceiling meet. Therefore, being unduly confined, the family is not numerous. The timid maker of these green hems bears the name of Pemphigus pallidus, derb. She is called pale because she has not the knack of painting her house purple. 256 Elsewhere the lateral fold, still turned over the upper surface of the leaf, grows much thicker, swells with fleshy tissue, develops wrinkles, assumes a crimson hue and becomes a short, hollow, spindle-shaped growth. This home, a fairly successful imitation of the seed-pods of the peony and the larkspur, belongs to the Pemphigus follicularius, pass. Elsewhere again the fold, which at first is made in the plane of the leaf, is now bent down at right angles under the leaf, becoming an ear-shaped appendage, a knotted, fleshy crescent, with a straw-yellow as its prevailing colour. This is the work of the Pemphigus semilunaris, pass.[ ] 257 The spherical galls take higher rank in the Plant-louse’s art. They are smooth, pale-yellow globes, varying in size from that of a cherry to that of an average apricot. They hang from the base of the leaves, which, despite these monstrous bladders, retain their normal colour, and, in all other respects, their normal shape. The insect which inflates these pretty capsules is Pemphigus utricularius, pass. But the most remarkable structures are the horn-shaped galls, truly Cyclopean monuments compared with their minute builders. Some attain a length of nine inches and are as thick as the neck of a claret-bottle. Grouped in threes or fours at the tips of the upper branches, they form barbaric trophies, twisted and fantastic danger-signals which might have graced the brows of some Alpine Ibex. The other galls all fall off with the leaves; not a trace of them remains on the tree in winter, and even these firmly cemented to their bough, last for a long time. Only the protracted assaults of wind and weather will destroy them completely. The base itself does not easily disappear. Next year [ ]it is still in its place, but dilapidated and reduced to the broken stump of a horn of plenty packed with the waxy felt that clothed the population in the days of its prosperity. In these palaces lived Pemphigus cornicularius, pass. 258 The purple pitchers of the first phase are provisional stations in which the Lice prepare for wholesale colonization. Each of these humble cottages has its Plant-louse from the foot of the tree. The solitary, who was herself hatched from a germ, makes haste to give birth to live youngsters, who gradually spread over the new leaves, and die. Then the true galls come, the great cities which will provide room for several generations. Here again, all the five classes of specialists between whom we have discriminated set to work, all labouring independently at the first filling out of the cabins. Mutual assistance will come later. May arrives; and already the simpler galls begin to grow: the lateral folds which, bent back upon the edge, become so many green hems. Beneath the awl of the black Louse, patiently pricking away at the leaf, a narrow border curves inwards from the [ ]edge. The line of attack measures a couple of centimetres. When it has worked long enough at this or that point, the tiny insect changes its place and goes elsewhere to begin all over again, standing motionless while its implement performs its functions. 259 2 Now what is the atom doing thus to warp what would be flat under natural conditions? Merely implanting its sucker. The prick of a needle, however skilfully guided, would bruise the tissues without affecting their form. The little insect must therefore instil a certain virus, which provokes an exaggerated flow of sap; it injects an irritant poison and the plant reacts by the swelling of the wounded parts. And now the hem is growing wider, with a slowness that defies our scouting: as well try to follow with the eyes the growth of a blade of grass. It is now a slanting roof, a gaping fold. The Louse is in the angle, at her post, doing her duty as a turncock. With her fine probe she stimulates and controls the flow of sap. In twenty-four hours the roof completes its descent, pressing tightly against the leaf. It is a [ ]lowered trap-door; but the mechanism of the structure works with such caution that the tiny insect, far from being crushed between the two thicknesses of leaf, retains its liberty of movement and moves about inside the fold as it would do in the open air. 260 A curious instrument, the awl of the little black Louse! With our modern machinery a child’s finger, applied to this or that lever, this or that valve, sets enormous masses in motion. Similarly, the Louse, with her delicate probe, sets powerful hydraulic machinery going and trims the sails of a leaflet. She is, after her fashion, an engineer on a gigantic scale. The spindle- or ear-shaped galls make their first appearance on the edge of the leaves in the form of narrow crimson borders. Soon the walls grow thicker and become gnarled and fleshy, expanding into excrescences from which all green is excluded. How is it that the part of the leaf treated by the Louse is naturally yellow and crimson, when, if simply folded, it retains its normal green hue unimpaired? Again, how is it that in the one case the thickness of the tissues is not increased while in the [ ]other it becomes augmented? Why does the spindle keep to the plane of the edge, whereas the ear-shaped gall, or auricle, abruptly bends its leaf and hangs vertically? In all three cases, the implement is the same and the work differs profoundly. Is it the effect of a virus whose properties vary according to the sucker that inoculates it? Is it the result of a change of method in wielding the awl? We are confounded. 261 The problem becomes doubly obscure when we consider the spherical galls. Here the original black Louse settles just at the base of a leaf, on the upper surface, against the median vein. There she takes her stand, motionless and patient. The point abraded by the awl is hollowed into a tiny pit, which soon forms a small protuberance beneath the underside of the leaf. As though its foothold were gradually withdrawn, the insect dives and is swallowed up by a pocket whose opening closes of its own accord by the contact of its lips. Here we have the Plant-louse at home, strictly isolated from the world. Though the edge of the fostering leaflet undergoes no alteration of shape or colour, the pitcher-shaped [ ]appendage at its base turns a pale yellow and grows larger day by day, thanks to the centrifugal expansion provoked by the insect’s irritant sucker. The continual punctures of the solitary Louse and presently of her offspring will enlarge it, by the end of the summer, to the dimensions of a fair-sized plum. 262 The horn-shaped galls originate in an entire leaf, selected from among the smallest. On the tops of the boughs there are sickly leaves, the last achievements of an exhausted impulse. Scarcely unfolded and innocent of green, the colour of health, they measure barely a fifth of an inch in length. It is on these vegetable trifles that the enormous horn-shaped structures are based; and even so the leaf is not completely utilized, but only one of its lobes: in short, a speck, a mere nothing. Exploited by the Plant-louse, this mere nothing acquires a peculiar energy. In the first place, it welds itself to the tip of the twig and becomes one with it, so that it lingers on the tree when the leaves fall and, with them, the other galls; next, it excites a flow of sap comparable with that of the [ ]pumpkin-stalk nourishing its fruit. The very small begets the huge. The gall is at first a pretty little horn, regular in shape and green all over. Open it. The interior is a magnificent flesh-colour and soft as satin. For the moment, a solitary Louse, a black one, inhabits this attractive residence. 263 The five kinds of establishment have been founded, from the fold to the horn; they have only to grow larger as their population increases. Now what are they doing, these Lice immured in solitary confinement, each after her own fashion? To begin with, they are changing their clothes and their shape. They used to be black and slender, suitably built for wandering over the budding leaves: now they adopt sedentary habits, turn yellow and put on flesh. And now, with the sucker implanted on the wall, which is swollen with turpentine, they quietly give birth to their young. For them this is a continuous function, like that of digestion. They have nothing else to do. Shall we call them fathers? No: the word would clash with the expression “giving birth.” Shall we speak of them as mothers? Not that either. The exact [ ]meaning of the word prevents us. They are neither one nor the other, nor are they an intermediate form. Our language has no term to describe these animal curiosities. We must resort to the plants to acquire an approximate notion of the whole procedure. 264 In our parts, the common garlic scarcely ever flowers: cultivation has caused it to lose its sexual duality. It knows nothing of true seed, to which the paternity of the stamen and the maternity of the pistil contribute. Yet the plant multiplies readily enough. The underground part begets its offspring directly, that is to say, it produces large fleshy buds, gathered into a cluster of what is known as cloves. Each is a living embryo plant, which, when buried in the soil, continues its development and grows like the original plant. To multiply the garlic in his kitchen-garden, the gardener has no other resource than that of the cloves, the usual seed being here non-existent. Some plants of the same alliaceous group are even more remarkable. They send up a normal stem, ending in what appears to be a spherical head of blossom. Properly this head should blossom into an umbel of flowers. [ ]But this is not what happens. There are no flowers whatever; they are replaced by bulbils, a diminutive form of clove. Sexuality has disappeared: instead of seeds, announced by the preparations for flowering, the plant produces plantlets, concentrated into fleshy buds. On the other hand, the underground part has a lavish supply of cloves. Though the garlic is sexless, its future is assured; it will have no lack of successors. 265 To a certain extent, the genesis of the Plant-louse will bear comparison with that of the garlic. The strange insect also puts forth bulbils: that is to say, it is spared all ovarian delay and procreates live offspring without assistance. The male is nobler than the female, says Lhomond. This is a pedantic formula, generally refuted by natural history. In the animal kingdom, work, industry and ability, those true titles of nobility, are the attributes of the mother. No matter: let us accept Lhomond’s dictum; and, since we are allowed the choice, let us speak of the Plant-louse [ ]as of the masculine gender, which is the nobler from the grammarian’s point of view. For that matter, nothing shall prevent us speaking of it as feminine, if our speech thereby gains in lucidity. 3 266 Isolated in his cell, the original Plant-louse, we were saying, grows a new skin and puts on flesh. He brings sons into the world, all of whose beaks play their part in enlarging the gall, while all their bellies are engaged in increasing the population. We are reminded of the avalanche which, at first a mere lump, becomes an enormous mass of snow. When summer is over, in September, let us open a gall, no matter which, spread out the contents on a sheet of paper, take up a magnifying-glass, and see what there is to see. Folds, spindles, auricles, globes and horns afford us almost the same spectacle, allowing for numbers, which are here restricted and there enormous. The Lice are a magnificent orange yellow. The largest have stumps on their shoulders, the rudiments of wings to be. All are clad in an exquisite cloak, whiter than snow, which projects some distance behind [ ]them, like a train. This finery is a waxy fleece exuded by the skin. It will not bear the touch of a camel-hair brush; a breath destroys it; but the Louse despoiled of it will soon sweat out another. In the crowded gall, where so many individuals are huddled together, jostling one another, the waxen garment is often torn to shreds and pulverized. Hence a collection of floury rags, forming the downiest of beds, in which the tribe lie about. 267 Mixed higgledy-piggledy with the orange Lice we see others, much less numerous but easily detected. They are smaller, and are sometimes a rusty-red, sometimes a fairly bright vermilion. Always stocky and wrinkled, they are, according to the age and the pattern of the gall, either round as a Tortoise or shaped like a triangle with rounded corners. On their backs, they carry six to eight rows of white tufts, a waxy exudation, like the white smocks of the others. An attentive examination with the magnifying-glass is needed to detect this detail of their costume. They never sport the wing-stumps which the others acquire sooner or later. One last characteristic, more important [ ]than all the rest, places these pigmies in a category completely by themselves. From time to time I see on their backs a monstrous protuberance which mounts as high as the neck and doubles the creature’s bulk. Now this hump, which is here to-day and gone to-morrow, only to reappear later, is the conjurer’s wallet containing the future. When I manage to open one, without mishap, with the point of a needle, I extract from it a slimy speck displaying two black eye-spots, with traces of segmentation. My Cæsarean operation has laid bare an embryo. 268 I reserved the right to pass, grammatically, from the masculine to the feminine gender. And this is the time to do so. I isolate a few of the hunch-backed squaws in a small glass tube, with a scrap of gall. They give me young ones; and the humps disappear. The observation, unfortunately, cannot be continued: the scrap of gall withers and my specimens die. None the less it is now established that these pigmy Lice are mothers and that they carry knapsacks on their backs as incubating pockets. The little red tortoises found in all the galls in the late summer are therefore as [ ]prolific as the famous old woman who lived in a shoe: they alone bring forth young. All around them swarm their descendants, fat orange babies, who deck themselves in snow-white furbelows, suck the sap, distend their stomachs and prepare to grow wings in view of an approaching migration. 269 Are the hunch-backed mothers all the immediate daughters of the black Louse, the founder of the gall, or do they form a lineage at various removes? The latter seems probable in the horn-shaped galls, where the mothers are so exceedingly numerous. A single origin would not account for this prodigality. As for the other, far less thickly-populated galls, it seems to me that a single generation of red Lice would be sufficient. Let me mention a few approximate figures. In the first week of September I open a horn-shaped gall, selected from among the largest. It measures eight inches in length by nearly an inch and a half in thickness at its greatest diameter. The population consists mainly of orange Lice, plump, smooth, and endowed with wing-stumps. These are the progeny of the tiny mothers. These latter are scarlet, stocky [ ]and wrinkled, with their fore-part tapering and their hinder-part as if it were cut off short, so that their shape is almost triangular. As far as I can judge in the confusion of such a multitude, they should number some hundreds. 270 To estimate the whole population, I pack it into a glass tube eighteen millimetres in diameter. The column thus formed occupies a height of 56 millimetres. The volume, therefore, amounts to 16,532 cubic millimetres. Therefore, allowing one Louse, roughly, to each cubic millimetre, the population of the gall is about sixteen thousand. As I cannot count, I gauge. Even so did Herschel gauge the Milky Way. For numerical infinity, the Louse vies with the star. In four months the black atom, the first pioneer of the gall, has left all these descendants; and the end is not yet. 4 5 6 7 About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Jean-Henri Fabre (2021). The Life of the Scorpion. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/66744/pg66744-images.html This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org , located at https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html .