d naturalist inspired! Let us repeat with him: "What
power, what wisdom, what inconceivable perfection in this least of
secrets that the vineyard locust has shown us!"

I have heard that a learned inquirer, for whom life is only a conflict
of physical and chemical forces, does not despair of one day obtaining
artificially organisable matter--_protoplasm_, as the official jargon
has it. If it were in my power I should hasten to satisfy this ambitious
gentleman.

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 albuminous
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