Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/36

26 the young of the Sitaris. The time has come for the last to begin to act. They have been called Triongulins by Léon Dufour, from the claws with which they are armed, and by which they attach themselves to the bodies of the Anthophores waiting for the next stage in the conditions that favor their development. With fine weather the female Anthophores come out and carry on their work of burrowing and storing up honey till the time of fecundation arrives. Then the Triongulin changes its quarters from the body of the male to that of the female, where it remains on the watch for the laying of the egg, when it transfers itself to that, and with it enters the honey-chamber. With it it is shut up when the Anthophorus closes the door of the chamber for another season. The Triongulin will not eat the honey, for it is sure death to it by drowning if it touches it. It floats on the egg and feeds upon it; when it has used up its ration, it changes its shape, as well as its habits and taste. It is as eager now for the honey as it was to keep away from it, and grows upon it till it goes through another change and becomes the Sitaris which we observe coming out from the chambers of the Anthophorus. Three years of assiduous studies and investigation were required to obtain this curious life-history. Contrast now the results obtained by Léon Dufour, an entomologist and naturalist of the school of Cuvier, with those which M. Fabre has reached by experiment.

I could also show you examples of an excessive socialism in societies of animals, even passing the limits of what has been conceived for men; comprising individuals whose parts are assigned with the greatest precision, some working to feed the collectivity, eating and digesting for all, others possessing the single function of reproduction of the species; and still others serving as beasts of burden for the rest; and looking a little further, we might occasionally discover idlers at rest while their fellows are working to feed them. Take the lobster which we fish from among the rocks and on the sea-coast. In the earlier part of its life, it swims at large on the surface of the fresh water. Its plump and fleshy body, so sought for as a food, is represented then by a broad and extremely thin plate, so peculiar that the zoölogists of the old schools made it not only a genus, but one of the types of a group very remote from its fellows. What would be the difference between these zoölogists and one who should regard the child and the adult of a savage man seen for the first time on some unknown island as forming two genera? Is it not evident that in the times of Linnæus and Cuvier, when they examined animals at only one moment of their existence, naturalists could not follow the filiation of facts which evolution alone reveals to us? The discovery of the Triongulin and the Biorhiza, made when species were defined only according to characteristics falling under the