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Updated: June 3, 2025
Here again the time-tables coincide. But it is perhaps in the celebrated Odyssey of the grub of the Sitaris that Fabre most urgently claims our admiration for the marvellous and incomprehensible wisdom of the Unconscious! Let us recapitulate the unheard-of series of events, the inextricable complication of circumstances, which are required to condition the lowly life of a Sitaris.
Henceforth fixed on this laying insect, the little Sitaris remain quiet, and have only to wait; their future is assured. The Anthophora has made her chambers, and with the greatest care has filled each of them with honey.
But what is this curious shell in which the Sitaris is invariably enclosed, a shell unexampled in the Beetle order? Can this be a case of parasitism in the second degree, that is, can the Sitaris be living inside the chrysalis of a first parasite, which itself exists at the cost of the Anthophora's larva or of its provisions?
Now, if an insect, undergoing transformations like those of the Sitaris, were to become the progenitor of a whole new class of insects, the course of development of the new class would be widely different from that of our existing insects; and the first larval stage certainly would not represent the former condition of any adult and ancient form.
We no longer have to do with the puny louse of the Oil-beetle, which lies in ambush on a cichoriaceous blossom in order to slip into the fleece of a harvesting Bee; nor with the black atom of the Sitaris, which swarms in a heap on the spot where it is hatched, at the Anthophora's door. I see the young Mylabris striding eagerly up and down the glass tube in which it was born. What is it seeking?
In the second place, observations repeated ad nauseam have shown me that at no period do we find in each invaded cell more than a single Sitaris, in one or other of the forms which it successively assumes.
By what bygone adaptations has the Sitaris successively acquired these diverse extraordinary phases of life, indicating possibly for each corresponding age some ancient and remote heredity? How many other arguments might evolution derive from his books, and what illustrations of the Darwinian philosophy has he unconsciously furnished!
Let us pass in silence over this long period of repose, during which the Sitaris, in the form of a pseudochrysalis, slumbers at the bottom of its cell, in a sleep as lethargic as that of a germ in its egg, and come to the months of June and July in the following year, the period of what we might call a second hatching.
Who can these laggards be but animalcules that have roamed too long in the walls of the nest? Failing to make their entrance at the proper time, they no longer find viands to suit them. The primary larva of the Sitaris continues from the autumn to the following spring.
Darwin himself gives an account of a very peculiar and abnormal mode of development of a certain beetle, the sitaris, as described by M. Fabre. This insect, instead of at first appearing in its grub stage, and then, after a time, putting on the adult form, is at first active and furnished with six legs, two long antennæ, and four eyes.
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