gathering and felting cotton is ill-equipped
for cutting leaves, kneading mud or mixing resin. The tool in its
possession decides its trade.

This is a very simple explanation, I admit, and one within the scope
of everybody: in itself a sufficient recommendation for any one who
has neither the inclination nor the time to undertake a more thorough
investigation. The popularity of certain speculative views is due
entirely to the easy food which they provide for our curiosity. They
save us much long and often irksome study; they impart a veneer of
general knowledge. There is nothing that achieves such immediate success
as an explanation of the riddle of the universe in a word or two. The
thinker does not travel so fast: content to know little so that he may
know something, he limits his field of search and is satisfied with
a scanty harvest, provided that the grain be of good quality. Before
agreeing that the tool determines the trade, he wants to see things with
his own eyes; and what he observes is far from confirming the sweeping
statement. Let us share his doubts for a moment and look into matters
more closely.

Franklin left us a maxim which is much to the point here. He said that a
good workman should be able to plane with a saw and to saw with a plane.
The insect is too good a workman not to follow the advice of the sage
of Boston. Its industry abounds in instances where the plane takes the
place of the saw, or the saw of the plane; its dexterity makes good the
inadequacy of the implement. To go no further, have we not just seen
different artisans collecting and using pitch, some with spoons, others
with rakes, others again with pincers? Therefore, with such equipment
as it possesses, the insect would be capable of abandoning cotton for
leaves, leaves for resin, resin for mortar, if some predisposition of
talent did not make it keep to its speciality.

These few lines, which are the outcome not of a heedless pen but of
mature reflection, will set people talking of hateful paradoxes. We
will let them talk and we will submit the following proposition to our
adversaries: take an entomologist of the highest merit, a Latreille
(Pierre Andre Latreille (1762-1833), one of the founders of modern
entomological science.--Translator's Note.), for instance, versed in all
the details of the structure of insects but utterly unacquainted with
their habits. He knows the dead insect better than anybody, but he has
never occupied