The study of numismatics

The Life and Love of the Insect by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE OLD WEEVILS

CHAPTER XIII. THE OLD WEEVILS

In winter, when the insect enjoys an enforced rest, the study of numismatics procures me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins, scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns his sod. He brings them to me and consults me as to their pecuniary value, never as to their meaning.

What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove! Men suffered of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future: to him, all history is summed up in that! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime of the idle.

I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the past. I scratch the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully strip it of its earthy rind, I examine it with the magnifying-glass, I try to decipher its legend. And my satisfaction is no small one when the little round bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read a page of humanity, not in books, which are witnesses open to suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were contemporary with the persons and the facts.[172]

This bit of silver, flattened by the blow of the punch, talks to me of the Vocontii:1 “VOOC … VOCVNT,” says the inscription. It comes from the little neighbouring town of Vaison, where Pliny the Naturalist sometimes went to spend a holiday. Here, perhaps, at the table of his host, the celebrated compiler, he learnt to appreciate the beccafico, famous among the epicures of Rome and still renowned to-day, under the name of grasset, among our Provençal gastronomers. It is a shame that my bit of silver says nothing of these events, more memorable than a battle.

It shows, on one side, a head and, on the other, a galloping horse, all barbarously inaccurate. A child trying its hand for the first time with the point of a pebble on the fresh mortar of the walls would produce no more shapeless design. Nay, of a surety, those gallant Allobroges were no artists.

How greatly superior to them were the foreigners from Phocæa! Here is a drachma of the Massalietes:2 ΜΑΣΣΑΛΙΗΤΩΝ. On the obverse, a head of Diana of Ephesus, chub-faced, full-cheeked, thick-lipped. A receding forehead, surmounted by a diadem; an abundant head of hair, streaming down the neck in a cascade of curls; heavy ear-drops, a necklace of pearls, a bow slung over the shoulder. Thus was the idol decked by the hands of the pious maidens of Syria. To tell the truth, it is not beautiful. It is sumptuous, if you will, and preferable, after all, to the ass’s ears which the beauties [173]of our days wear perched upon their heads. What a singular freak is fashion, so fruitful in the means of uglification! Business knows nothing of beauty, says this divinity of the traders; it prefers the profitable, embellished with luxury. Thus speaks the drachma.

On the reverse, a lion clawing the earth and roaring wide-mouthed. Not of to-day alone is the savagery that symbolizes power under the form of some formidable brute, as though evil were the supreme expression of strength. The eagle, the lion and other bandits often figure on the reverse of coins. But the reality is not sufficient; the imagination invents monstrosities: the centaur, the dragon, the hippogriff, the unicorn, the double-headed eagle. Are the inventors of these emblems really superior to the redskin who celebrates the prowess of his scalping-knife with a bear’s paw, an eagle’s wing or a jaguar’s tooth stuck into his scalp-lock? We may safely doubt it.

How preferable to these heraldic horrors is the reverse of our own silver coinage brought into circulation of late years! It shows us a sower who, with a nimble hand, at sunrise, fills the furrow with the good seed of thought. It is very simple and it is great; it makes us think.

The Marseilles drachma has for its sole merit its magnificent relief. The artist who made the dies was a master of the graver’s tool; but he lacked the breath of inspiration. The chub-faced Diana is a rakes’ wench and no better.

Here is the NAMASAT of the Volscæ, which became the colony of Nîmes. Side by side, profiles of Augustus and his minister Agrippa. The former, with his hard brow, his flat skull, his grasping, broken nose, inspires me with [174]but little confidence, notwithstanding what gentle Virgil wrote of him:

Deus nobis haec otia fecit.

It is success that makes gods. Had he not succeeded in his criminal projects, Augustus the divine would have remained Octavius the scoundrel.

His minister pleases me better. He was a great shifter of stones, who, with his building operations, his aqueducts, his roads, came to civilize the rustic Volscæ a little. Not far from my village, a splendid road crosses the plain in a straight line, starting from the banks of the Aygues, and climbs up yonder, tedious in its monotonous length, to cross the Sérignan hills, under the protection of a powerful oppidum, which, much later, became the old castle, the Castelas. It is a section of Agrippa’s Road, which joined Marseilles and Vienne. The majestic ribbon, twenty centuries old, is still frequented. We no longer see the little brown foot-soldier of the Roman legions upon it; in his stead, we see the peasant going to market at Orange, with his flock of sheep or his drove of unruly porkers. And I prefer the latter.

Let us turn over the green-crusted penny. “COL. NEM.,”3 colony of Nîmes, the reverse tells us. The inscription is accompanied by a crocodile chained to a palm-tree from which hang crowns. It is an emblem of Egypt, conquered by the veterans who founded the colony. The beast of the Nile gnashes its teeth at the foot of the familiar tree. It speaks to us of Antony, the rip; it tells us of Cleopatra, whose nose, had it been an inch shorter, would have changed the face of the world. Thanks to the memories which it awakens, the scaly-rumped reptile becomes a superb historical lesson.[175]

In this way, the great lessons of the numismatical science of metals could follow one another for many a day and be constantly varied without leaving my near neighbourhood. But there is another science of numismatics, far superior and less costly, which, with its medals, the fossils, tells us the history of life. I speak of the numismatics of stones.

My very window-ledge, the confidant of bygone ages, talks to me of a vanished world. It is, literally speaking, an ossuary, each particle of which retains the imprint of past lives. That block of stone has lived. Spines of sea-urchins, teeth and vertebræ of fish, broken pieces of shells, shivers of madrepores form a pulp of dead existences. Examined ashlar by ashlar, my house would resolve itself into a reliquary, a rag-fair of things that were alive in the days of old.

The rocky layer from which building-materials are derived in these parts covers, with its mighty shell, the greater portion of the neighbouring upland. Here the quarry-man has dug for none knows how many centuries, since the time when Agrippa hewed cyclopean flags to form the stages and façade of the Orange theatre. And here, daily, the pick-axe uncovers curious fossils. The most remarkable of these are teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone, bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction!

The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon. The shark of to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant.

Other Squali abound in the same stone, all fierce gullets. It contains Oxyrhinæ (Oxyrhina Xiphodon, Agass.), with teeth shaped like pointed cleavers; Hemipristes (Hemipristis Serra, Agass.), whose jaws are furnished with curved and toothed Malay creeses; Lamiæ (Lamia Denticulata, Agass.), whose mouths bristle with flexuous, steeled daggers, flattened on one side, convex on the other; Notidani (Notidanus Primigenius, Agass.), whose sunk teeth are crowned with radiate indentations.

This dental arsenal, the eloquent witness of the old butcheries, can hold its own with the Crocodile of Nîmes, the Diana of Marseilles, the Horse of Vaison. With its panoply of carnage, it tells me how extermination came at all times to lop off the surplus of life; it says:

“On the very spot where you stand meditating upon a shiver of stone, an arm of the sea once stretched, filled with truculent devourers and peaceable victims. A long gulf occupied the future site of the Rhône Valley. Its billows broke at no great distance from your dwelling.”

Here, in fact, are the cliffs of the bank, in such a state of preservation that, on concentrating my thoughts, I seem to hear the thunder of the waves. Sea-urchins, Lithodomi, Petricolæ, Pholaidids have left their signatures upon the rock: hemispherical recesses large enough to contain one’s fist, round cells, cabins with a narrow conduit-pipe through which the recluse received the incoming water, constantly renewed and laden with nourishment. Sometimes, the erstwhile occupant is there, [177]mineralized, intact to the tiniest details of his striæ and scales, a frail ornament; more often, he has disappeared, dissolved, and his house has filled with a fine sea mud, hardened into a chalky kernel.

In this quiet inlet, some eddy has collected and drowned at the bottom of the mire, now turned into marl, enormous heaps of shells, of every shape and size. It is a molluscs’ burying-ground, with hills for tumuli. I dig up oysters a cubit long and weighing five or six pounds apiece. One could shovel up, in the immense pile, Scallops, Cones, Cytheridæ, Mactridæ, Murices, Turritellidæ, Mitridæ and others too numerous, too innumerable to mention. You stand stupefied before the vital ardour of the days of old, which was able to supply such a pile of relics in a mere nook of earth.

The necropolis of shells tells us, besides, that time, that patient renewer of the order of things, has mown down not only the individual, a precarious being, but also the species. Nowadays, the neighbouring sea, the Mediterranean, has almost nothing identical with the population of the vanished gulf. To find a few features of similarity between the present and the past, we should have to seek them in the tropical seas. The climate, therefore, has become colder; the sun is slowly becoming extinguished; the species are dying out. Thus speak the numismatics of the stones on my window-ledge.

Without leaving my field of observation, so modest, so limited and yet so rich, let us once more consult the stone and, this time, on the subject of the insect. The country round Apt abounds in a strange rock that breaks off in thin plates, similar to sheets of whitish cardboard. It burns with a sooty flame and a bituminous smell; and it was deposited at the bottom of great lakes haunted by [178]crocodiles and giant tortoises. Those lakes no human eye has ever seen. Their basins have been replaced by the ridges of the hills; their muds, peacefully deposited in thin courses, have become mighty banks of rock.

Let us break off a slab and subdivide it into sheets with the point of a knife, a work as easy as separating the superposed layers of a piece of paste- or mill-board. In so doing, we are examining a volume taken from the library of the mountains, we are turning the pages of a magnificently illustrated book. It is a manuscript of nature, far superior to the Egyptian papyrus. On almost every page are diagrams; nay, better: realities converted into pictures.

On this page are fish, grouped at random. One might take them for a dish fried in oil. Back-bones, fins, vertebral links, bones of the head, crystal of the eye turned to a black globule, everything is there, in its natural arrangement. One thing alone is absent: the flesh. No matter: our dish of gudgeons looks so good that we feel an inclination to scratch off a bit with our finger and taste this supramillenary preserve. Let us indulge our fancy and put between our teeth a morsel of this mineral fry seasoned with petroleum.

There is no inscription to the picture. Reflection makes good the deficiency. It says to us:

“These fishes lived here, in large numbers, in peaceful waters. Suddenly, swells came and asphyxiated them in their mud-thickened waves. Buried forthwith in the mire and thus rescued from the agents of destruction, they have passed through time, will pass through it indefinitely, under the cover of their winding-sheet.”

The same swells brought from the adjacent rain-swept shores a host of refuse, both vegetable and animal, so [179]much so that the lacustrian deposit talks to us also of things on land. It is a general record of the life of the time.

Let us turn a page of our slab, or rather our album. Here are winged seeds, leaves drawn in brown prints. The stone herbal vies in botanical accuracy with a normal herbal. It repeats what the shells had already told us: the world is changing, the sun is losing its strength. The vegetation of modern Provence is not what it was in former days; it no longer includes palm-trees, camphor-yielding laurels, tufted araucarias and many other trees and shrubs whose equivalents belong to the torrid regions.

Continue to turn the pages. We now come to the insects. The most frequent are the Diptera, of middling size, often very humble flies and gnats. The teeth of the great Squali astonished us by their soft polish amid the roughness of their chalky veinstone. What shall we say of these frail midges preserved intact in their marly shrine? The frail creature, which our fingers could not grasp without crushing it, lies undeformed beneath the weight of the mountains!

The six slender legs, which the least thing is enough to disjoint, here lie spread upon the stone, correct in shape and arrangement, in the attitude of the insect at rest. There is nothing lacking, not even the tiny double claws of the extremities. Here are the two wings, unfurled. The fine net-work of their nervures can be studied under the lens as clearly as in the Dipteron of the collections, stuck upon its pin. The antennary tufts have lost none of their subtle elegance; the belly gives us the number of the rings, edged with a row of atoms that were cilia.[180]

The carcase of a mastodont, defying time in its sandy bed, already astonishes us: a gnat of exquisite delicacy, preserved intact in the thickness of the rock, staggers our imagination.

Certainly, the Mosquito, carried by the rising swells, did not come from far away. Before his arrival, the hurly-burly of a thread of water must have reduced him to that annihilation to which he was so near. He lived on the shores of the lake. Killed by the joys of a morning—the old age of gnats—he fell from the top of his reed, was forthwith drowned and disappeared in the muddy catacombs.

Who are those others, those dumpy ones, with hard, convex elytra, the most numerous next to the Diptera? Their small heads, prolonged into a snout, tell us plainly. They are proboscidian Coleoptera, Rhynchophora, or, in less hard terms, Weevils. There are small ones, middling ones, large ones, similar in dimensions to their counterparts of to-day.

Their attitudes on the chalky slab are not as correct as those of the Mosquito. The legs are entangled anyhow; the beak, the rostrum is at one time hidden under the chest, at another projects forward. Some show it in profile; others—more frequent these—stretch it to one side, as the result of a twist in the neck.

These dislocated, contorted insects did not receive the swift and peaceful burial of the Dipteron. Though sundry of them may have lived on the plants on the banks, the others, the majority, come from the surrounding neighbourhood, brought by the rains, which warped their joints in crossing such obstacles as branches and stones. A stout armour has kept the body unscathed, but the delicate articulations of the members have given way [181]to some extent; and the miry winding-sheet received the drowned Beetles as the disorder of the passage left them.

These strangers, come perhaps from afar, supply us with precious information. They tell us that, whereas the banks of the lake had the Mosquito as the chief representative of the insect class, the woods had the Weevil.

Outside the snout-carrying family, the sheets of my Apt rock show me hardly anything more, especially in the order of the Coleoptera. Where are the other terrestrial groups, the Carabus, the Dung-beetle, the Capricorn, which the wash of the rains, indifferent as to its harvests, would have brought to the lake even as it did the Weevil? There is not the least vestige of those tribes, so prosperous to-day.

Where are the Hydrophilus, the Gyrinus, the Dytiscus, all inhabitants of the water? These lacustrians had a great chance of coming down to us mummified between two sheets of marl. If there were any in those days, they lived in the lake, whose muds would have preserved these horn-clad insects even more perfectly than the little fishes and especially than the Dipteron. Well, of those aquatic Coleoptera there is no trace either.

Where were they, where were those missing from the geological reliquary? Where were they of the thickets, of the green-sward, of the worm-eaten trunks: Capricorns, borers of wood; Sacred Beetles, workers in dung; Carabi, disembowellers of game? One and all were in the limbo of the time to come. The present of that period did not possess them: the future awaited them. The Weevil, therefore, if I may credit the modest records which I am free to consult, is the oldest of the Coleoptera.[182]

Life, at the start, fashioned oddities which would be screaming discords in the present harmony of things. When it invented the Saurian, it revelled at first in monsters fifteen and twenty yards long. It placed horns on their noses and eyes, paved their backs with fantastic scales, hollowed their necks into spiny wallets, wherein their heads withdrew as into a hood. It even tried, though not with great success, to give them wings. After these horrors, the procreating ardour calmed down and produced the charming green Lizard of our hedges.

When it invented the bird, it filled its beak with the pointed teeth of the reptile and appended a long, feathered tail unto its rump. These undetermined and revoltingly ugly creatures were the distant prelude to the Robin Redbreast and the Dove.

All these primitives are noted for a very small skull, an idiot’s brain. The brute of antiquity is, first and foremost, an atrocious machine for snapping, with a stomach for digesting. The intellect does not count as yet. That will come later.

The Weevil, in his fashion, to a certain extent, repeats these aberrations. See the extravagant appendage to his little head. It is here a short, thick snout; there a sturdy beak, round or cut four-square; elsewhere a crazy reed, thin as a hair, long as the body and longer. At the tip of this egregious instrument, in the terminal mouthpiece, are the fine shears of the mandibles; on the sides, the antennæ, with their first joints set in a groove.

What is the use of this beak, this snout, this caricature of a nose? Where did the insect find the model? Nowhere. The Weevil is its inventor and retains the monopoly. Outside his family, no Coleopteron indulges in these buccal eccentricities.[183]

Observe, also, the smallness of the head, a bulb that hardly swells beyond the base of the snout. What can it have inside? A very poor nervous equipment, the sign of exceedingly limited instincts. Before seeing them at work, we make small account of these microcephali, in respect of intelligence; we class them among the obtuse, among creatures bereft of working capacity. These surmises will not be very largely upset.

Though the Curculio be but little glorified by his talents, this is no reason for scorning him. As we learn from the lacustrian schists, he was in the van of the insects with the armoured wing-cases; he was long stages ahead of the workers in incubation within the limits of possibility. He speaks to us of primitive forms, sometimes so quaint; he is, in his own little world, what the bird with the toothed jaws and the Saurian with the horned eyebrows are in a higher world.

In ever-thriving legions, he has been handed down to us without changing his characteristics. He is to-day as he was in the old times of the continents: the prints in the chalky slates proclaim the fact aloud. Under any such print, I would venture to write the name of the genus, sometimes even of the species.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form. By consulting the modern Curculionid, therefore, we shall obtain a very approximate chapter upon the biology of his predecessors, at the time when Provence had great lakes filled with crocodiles and palm-trees on their banks wherewith to shade them. The history of the present will teach us the history of the past.

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