nd,
screened from the indiscretion of the passers by, close to my house,
with clumps of rushes and patches of duckweed. Here, in my leisure
hours, in the shade of a willow, I should have meditated upon aquatic
life, a primitive life, easier than our own, simpler in its affections
and its brutalities. I should have watched the unalloyed happiness of
the mollusk, the frolics of the Whirligig, the figure-skating of the
Hydrometra [a water bug known as the Pond skater], the dives of the
Dytiscus beetle, the veering and tacking of the Notonecta [the water
boatman], who, lying on her back, rows with two long oars, while her
short forelegs, folded against her chest, wait to grab the coming prey.
I should have studied the eggs of the Planorbis, a glairy nebula wherein
focuses of life are condensed even as suns are condensed in the nebulae
of the heavens. I should have admired the nascent creature that turns,
slowly turns in the orb of its egg and describes a volute, the draft,
perhaps, of the future shell. No planet circles round its center of
attraction with greater geometrical accuracy.

I should have brought back a few ideas from my frequent visits to the
pond. Fate decided otherwise: I was not to have my sheet of water. I
have tried the artificial pond, between four panes of glass. A poor
shift! Our laboratory aquariums are not even equal to the print left in
the mud by a mule's hoof, when once a shower has filled the humble basin
and life has stocked it with its marvels.

In spring, with the hawthorn in flower and the crickets at their
concerts, a second wish often came to me. Along the road, I light upon a
dead mole, a snake killed with a stone, victims both of human folly.
The mole was draining the soil and purging it of its vermin. Finding him
under his spade, the laborer broke his back for him and flung him over
the hedge. The snake, roused from her slumber by the soft warmth of
April, was coming into the sun to shed her skin and take on a new one.
Man catches sight of her: 'Ah, would you?' says he. 'See me do something
for which the world will thank me!'

And the harmless beast, our auxiliary in the terrible battle which
husbandry wages against the insect, has its head smashed in and dies.

The two corpses, already decomposing, have begun to smell. Whoever
approaches with eyes that do not see turns away his head and passes
on. The observer stops and lifts the remains with his foot; he looks. A
world is swarming un