There is not a single peasant in my village so blind as to be unaware of the total absence of Cigales in winter; and every tiller of the soil, every gardener, is familiar with the first phase of the insect, the larva, which his spade is perpetually discovering when he banks up the olives at the approach of the cold weather, and he knows, having seen it a thousand times by the edge of the country paths, how in summer this larva issues from the earth from a little round well of its own making; how it climbs a twig or a stem of grass, turns upon its back, climbs out of its skin, drier now than parchment, and becomes the Cigale; a creature of a fresh grass-green colour which is rapidly replaced by brown.
We cannot suppose that the Greek peasant was so much less intelligent than the Provencal that he can have failed to see what the least observant must have noticed.

He knew what my rustic neighbours know so well.

The scribe, whoever he may have been, who was responsible for the fable was in the best possible circumstances for correct knowledge of the subject.

Whence, then, arose the errors of his tale?
Less excusably than La Fontaine, the Greek fabulist wrote of the Cigale of the books, instead of interrogating the living Cigale, whose cymbals were resounding on every side; careless of the real, he followed tradition.

He himself echoed a more ancient narrative; he repeated some legend that had reached him from India, the venerable mother of civilisations.