Bramble-Bees and Others, page 209 by Jean Henri Fabre
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ined freshness and of the signs of life proved by slight movements, the resemblance between my victim and those of the predatory insects is so great that no Sphex and no Tachytes would have disowned the product of my devices. My Cricket, my Ephippiger, my Mantis had the same freshness as theirs; they preserved it as theirs did for a period amply sufficient to allow of the grubs' complete evolution. They proved to me, in the most conclusive manner, they prove to all whom it may interest, that the poison of the Bees, leaving its hideous violence on one side, does not differ in its effects from the poison of the predatory Wasps. Are they alkaline or acid? The question is an idle one in this connection. Both of them intoxicate, derange, torpify the nervous centres and thus produce either death or paralysis, according to the method of inoculation. For the moment, that is all. No one is yet able to say the last word on the actions of those poisons, so terrible in infinitesimal doses. But on the point under discussion we need no longer be ignorant: the Wasp owes the preservation of her grub's provisions not to any special qualities of her poison but to the extreme precision of her surgery.
A last and more plausible objection is that raised by Darwin when he said that there were no fossil remains of instincts. And, if there were, O master, what would they teach us? Not very much more than what we learn from the instincts of to-day. Does not the geologist make the erstwhile carcases live anew in our minds in the light of the world as we see it? With nothing but analogy to guide them, he describes how some saurian lived in the jurassic age; there are no fossil remains of habits, but nevertheless he can tell us plenty about them, things worthy of credence, because the present teaches him the past. Let us do a little as he does.
I will suppose a precursor of the Calicurgi (The Calicurgus, or Pompilus, is a Hunting Wasp, feeding her larvae on Spiders. Cf. "The Life and Love of the Insect": chapter 12.--Translato