derneath; life is eagerly consuming the dead. Let us
replace matters as they were and leave death's artisans to their task.
They are engaged in a most deserving work.

To know the habits of those creatures charged with the disappearance of
corpses, to see them busy at their work of disintegration, to follow
in detail the process of transmutation that makes the ruins of what has
lived return apace into life's treasure house: these are things that
long haunted my mind. I regretfully left the mole lying in the dust of
the road. I had to go, after a glance at the corpse and its harvesters.
It was not the place for philosophizing over a stench. What would people
say who passed and saw me!

And what will the reader himself say, if I invite him to that sight?
Surely, to busy one's self with those squalid sextons means soiling
one's eyes and mind? Not so, if you please! Within the domain of our
restless curiosity, two questions stand out above all others: the
question of the beginning and the question of the end. How does matter
unite in order to assume life? How does it separate when returning to
inertia? The pond, with its Planorbis eggs turning round and round,
would have given us a few data for the first problem; the Mole, going
bad under conditions not too repulsive, will tell us something about the
second: he will show us the working of the crucible wherein all things
are melted to begin anew. A truce to nice delicacy! Odi profanum vulgus
et arceo; hence, ye profane: you would not understand the mighty lesson
of the rag tank.

I am now in a position to realize my second wish. I have space, air and
quiet in the solitude of the harmas. None will come here to trouble me,
to smile or to be shocked at my investigations. So far, so good; but
observe the irony of things: now that I am rid of passers by, I have to
fear my cats, those assiduous prowlers, who, finding my preparations,
will not fail to spoil and scatter them. In anticipation of their
misdeeds, I establish workshops in midair, whither none but genuine
corruption agents can come, flying on their wings. At different points
in the enclosure, I plant reeds, three by three, which, tied at their
free ends, form a stable tripod. From each of these supports, I hang, at
a man's height, an earthenware pan filled with fine sand and pierced at
the bottom with a hole to allow the water to escape, if it should rain.
I garnish my apparatus with dead bodies. The snake, the lizard,