[Social Life in the Insect World by J. H. Fabre]@TWC D-Link book
Social Life in the Insect World

CHAPTER XX
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If it were in my power I should hasten to satisfy this ambitious gentleman.
But so be it: you have really prepared protoplasm.

By force of meditation, profound study, minute care, impregnable patience, your desire is realised: you have extracted from your apparatus an albuminous slime, easily corruptible and stinking like the devil at the end of a few days: in short, a nastiness.

What are you going to do with it?
Organise something?
Will you give it the structure of a living edifice?
Will you inject it with a hypodermic syringe between two impalpable plates to obtain were it only the wing of a fly?
That is very much what the locust does.

It injects its protoplasm between the two surfaces of an embryo organ, and the material forms a wing-cover, because it finds as guide the ideal archetype of which I spoke but now.

It is controlled in the labyrinth of its course by a device anterior to the injection: anterior to the material itself.
This archetype, the co-ordinator of forms; this primordial regulator; have you got it on the end of your syringe?
No! Then throw away your product.


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