idity is
realized as the time of the metamorphosis draws near. When they wished
Medea to restore Pelias to the vigor of youth, his daughters cut the old
king's body to pieces and boiled it in a cauldron, for there can be no
new existence without a prior dissolution. We must pull down before
we can rebuild; the analysis of death is the first step towards the
synthesis of life. The substance of the grub that is to be transformed
into a bee begins, therefore, by disintegrating and dissolving into
a fluid broth. The materials of the future insect are obtained by a
general recasting. Even as the founder puts his old bronzes into the
melting pot in order afterwards to cast them in a mould whence the metal
will issue in a different shape, so life liquefies the grub, a mere
digesting machine, now thrown aside, and out of its running matter
produces the perfect insect, bee, butterfly or beetle, the final
manifestation of the living creature.

Let us open a Chalicodoma grub under the microscope, during the period
of torpor. Its contents consists almost entirely of a liquid broth, in
which swim numberless oily globules and a fine dust of uric acid, a sort
of off-throw of the oxidized tissues. A flowing thing, shapeless and
nameless, is all that the animal is, if we add abundant ramified air
ducts, some nervous filaments and, under the skin, a thin layer
of muscular fibers. A condition of this kind accounts for a fatty
transpiration through the skin when the Anthrax' sucker is at work. At
any other time, when the larva is in the active period or else when the
insect has reached the perfect stage, the firmness of the tissues would
resist the transfusion and the suckling of the Anthrax would become a
difficult matter, or even impossible. In point of fact, I find the grub
of the fly established, in the vast majority of cases, on the sleeping
larva and sometimes, but rarely, on the pupa. Never do I see it on the
vigorous larva eating its honey; and hardly ever on the insect brought
to perfection, as we find it enclosed in its cell all through the autumn
and winter. And we can say the same of the other grub eaters that drain
their victims without wounding them: all are engaged in their death
dealing work during the period of torpor, when the tissues are
fluidified. They empty their patient, who has become a bag of running
grease with a diffused life; but not one, among those I know, reaches
the Anthrax' perfection in the art of extracti