oids fatal
to any stomach other than that of the appointed consumer; so that animal
food is not confined to one and the same eater. What does not man eat,
from that delicacy of the arctic regions, soup made of Seal's blood and
a scrap of Whale-blubber wrapped in a willow-leaf for a vegetable, to
the Chinaman's fried Silk-worm or the Arab's dried Locust? What would
he not eat, if he had not to overcome the repugnance dictated by habit
rather than by actual necessity? The prey being uniform in its nutritive
principles, the carnivorous larva ought to accommodate itself to any
sort of game, above all if the new dish be not too great a departure
from consecrated usage. Thus should I argue, with no less probability on
my side, had I to begin all over again. But, as all our arguments have
not the value of a single fact, I should be forced in the end to resort
to experiment.

I did so the next year, on a larger scale and with a greater variety of
subjects. I shrink from a continuous narrative of my experiments and
of my personal education in this new art, where the failure of one
day taught me the way to succeed on the morrow. It would be long and
tedious. Enough if I briefly state my results and the conditions which
must be fulfilled in order to run the delicate refectory as it should be
run.

And, first, we must not dream of detaching the egg from its natural prey
to lay it on another. The egg adheres pretty firmly, by its cephalic
pole, to the quarry. To remove it from its place would inevitably
jeopardize its future. I therefore let the larva hatch and acquire
sufficient strength to bear the removal without peril. For that matter,
my excavations most often provide me with my subjects in the form of
larvae. I adopt for rearing-purposes the larvae that are a quarter to a
half developed. The others are too young and risky to handle, or too old
and limited to a short period of artificial feeding.

Secondly, I avoid bulky heads of game, a single one of which would
suffice for the whole growing-stage. I have already said and I here
repeat how nice a matter it is to consume a victim which has to keep
fresh for a couple of weeks and not to finish dying until it is almost
entirely devoured. Death here leaves no corpse; when life is extinct,
the body has disappeared, leaving only a shred of skin. Larvae with only
one large prey have a special art of eating, a dangerous art, in which a
clumsy bite would prove fatal. If bitten befor