ime, place and climate. When Ephippigers run short,
you fall back upon Crickets; when there are no Crickets, you capture
Grasshoppers. But no, my beautiful Sphex-wasps, you were not such fools
as that. If in our days you are each confined to a standing family-dish,
it is because your ancestress of the lacustrian schists never taught you
variety.

Could she have taught you uniformity? Let us suppose that the Sphex of
antiquity, a novice in the gastronomic art, prepared her potted meats
with a single kind of game, no matter what. It was then her descendants
who, subdivided into groups and constituted into so many distinct
species by the slow travail of the centuries, realized that in addition
to the ancestral fare there existed a host of other foods. Tradition
being abandoned, there was nothing to guide their choice. They therefore
tried a bit of everything in the way of insect game, at hap-hazard;
and each time the larva, whose tastes alone had to be consulted, was
satisfied with the food supplied, as it is to-day in the refectory
provisioned by my care.

Every attempt led to the invention of a new dish, an important event,
according to the masters, an inestimable resource for the family, who
were thereby delivered from the menace of death and enabled to thrive
over large areas whence the absence or rarity of a uniform game would
have excluded it. And, after making use of a host of different viands
in order to attain the culinary variety which is to-day adopted by the
whole of the Sphex nation, lo and behold, each species confines itself
to a single sort of game, outside which every specimen is obstinately
refused, not at table, of course, but in the hunting-field! By your
experiments, from age to age, to have discovered variety in diet; to
have practised it, to the great advantage of your race, and to end up
with uniformity, the cause of decadence; to have known the excellent and
to repudiate it for the middling: oh, my Sphex-wasps, it would be stupid
if the theory of evolution were correct!

To avoid insulting you and also from respect for common sense, I prefer
therefore to believe that, if in our days you confine your hunting to
a single kind of game, it is because you have never known any other. I
prefer to believe that your common ancestress, your precursor, whether
her tastes were simple or complex, is a pure chimera, for, if they
were any relationship between you, having tested everything in order to
arrive at