pleted, when the
passage of escape is bored and furnished with its lid of superficial
membrane, the female Chalcidian arrives in a busy mood. She inspects the
peas, still on the vine, and enclosed in their pods; she auscultates
them with her antennae; she discovers, hidden under the general envelope,
the weak points in the epidermic covering of the peas. Then, applying
her oviscapt, she thrusts it through the side of the pod and perforates
the circular trap-door. However far withdrawn into the centre of the
pea, the Bruchus, whether larvae or nymph, is reached by the long
oviduct. It receives an egg in its tender flesh, and the thing is done.
Without possibility of defence, since it is by now a somnolent grub or a
helpless pupa, the embryo weevil is eaten until nothing but skin
remains. What a pity that we cannot at will assist the multiplication of
this eager exterminator! Alas! our assistants have got us in a vicious
circle, for if we wished to obtain the help of any great number of
Chalcidians we should be obliged in the first place to breed a
multiplicity of Bruchidae.

CHAPTER XIX

AN INVADER.--THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

If there is one vegetable on earth that more than any other is a gift of
the gods, it is the haricot bean. It has all the virtues: it forms a
soft paste upon the tongue; it is extremely palatable, abundant,
inexpensive, and highly nutritious. It is a vegetable meat which,
without being bloody and repulsive, is the equivalent of the horrors
outspread upon the butcher's slab. To recall its services the more
emphatically, the Provencal idiom calls it the _gounflo-gus_--the filler
of the poor.

Blessed Bean, consoler of the wretched, right well indeed do you fill
the labourer, the honest, skilful worker who has drawn a low number in
the crazy lottery of life. Kindly Haricot, with three drops of oil and a
dash of vinegar you were the favourite dish of my young years; and even
now, in the evening of my days, you are welcome to my humble porringer.
We shall be friends to the last.

To-day it is not my intention to sing your merits; I wish simply to ask
you a question, being curious: What is the country of your origin? Did
you come from Central Asia with the broad bean and the pea? Did you make
part of that collection of seeds which the first pioneers of culture
brought us from their gardens? Were you known to antiquity?

Here the insect, an impartial and well-informed witness, answers: "No;
in ou