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Preface the life lavished upon the abysses of death, without counting the no less vast, but so to speak more human problems which, among infinite others, are inscribed within the range, if not within the grasp, of our intelligence: parthenogenesis; the prodigious geometry of the wasps and bees; the logarithmic spiral of the Snail; the antennary sense; the miraculous force which, in absolute isolation, without the possible introduction of anything from the outside, increases the volume of the Minotaurus' egg ten-fold, where it lies, and, during seven to nine months, nourishes with an invisible and spiritual food, not the lethargy, but the active life of the Scorpion and of the young of the Lycosa and the Clotho Spider. He does not attempt to explain them by one of those generally-acceptable theories such as that of evolution, which merely shifts the ground of the difficulty and which, I may mention in passing, emerges from these volumes in a somewhat sorry plight, after being sharply confronted with incontestable facts.

Waiting for chance or a god to enlighten us, he is able, in the presence of the unknown, to preserve that great religious and 33