The Wonders of Instinct Part 20

I am fortunate at this moment in having a highly-cultured visitor, versed in the profundities of philosophic thought. I make way for him before the apparatus wherein the Microgaster is at work. For an hour and more, standing lens in hand, he, in his turn, looks and sees what I have just seen; he watches the layers who go from one egg to the other, make their choice, draw their slender lancet and p.r.i.c.k what the stream of pa.s.sers-by, one after the other, have already p.r.i.c.ked. Thoughtful and a little uneasy, he puts down his lens at last. Never had he been vouchsafed so clear a glimpse as here, in my finger-wide tube, of the masterly brigandage that runs through all life down to that of the very smallest.