Instead of this unscrupulously omnivorous race, levying booty upon every kind of game, to its very great advantage, what do we see to-day? Each Sphex is stupidly limited to an unvarying diet; she hunts only one kind of prey, though her larva accepts them all. One will have nothing but the Ephippiger and must have a female at that; another will have nothing but the Cricket. This one hunts the Locust and nothing else; that one the Mantis and the Empusa. Yet another is addicted to the Grey Worm and another to the Looper.
Fools! How great was your mistake in allowing the wise eclecticism of your ancestress, whose relics now repose in the hard mud of some lacustrian stratum, to become obsolete! How much better would things be for you and yours! Abundance is assured; painful and often fruitless searches are avoided; the larder is crammed without being subject to the accidents of time, place and climate. When Ephippigers run short, you fall back upon Crickets; when there are no Crickets, you capture Grasshoppers. But no, my beautiful Sphex-wasps, you were not such fools as that. If in our days you are each confined to a standing family-dish, it is because your ancestress of the lacustrian schists never taught you variety.
Could she have taught you uniformity? Let us suppose that the Sphex of antiquity, a novice in the gastronomic art, prepared her potted meats with a single kind of game, no matter what. It was then her descendants who, subdivided into groups and constituted into so many distinct species by the slow travail of the centuries, realized that in addition to the ancestral fare there existed a host of other foods. Tradition being abandoned, there was nothing to guide their choice. They therefore tried a bit of everything in the way of insect game, at hap-hazard; and each time the larva, whose tastes alone had to be consulted, was satisfied with the food supplied, as it is to-day in the refectory provisioned by my care.
Every attempt led to the invention of a new dish, an important event, according to the masters, an inestimable resource for the family, who were thereby delivered from the menace of death and enabled to thrive over large areas whence the absence or rarity of a uniform game would have excluded it. And, after making use of a host of different viands in order to attain the culinary variety which is to-day adopted by the whole of the Sphex nation, lo and behold, each species confines itself to a single sort of game, outside which every specimen is obstinately refused, not at table, of course, but in the hunting-field! By your experiments, from age to age, to have discovered variety in diet; to have practised it, to the great advantage of your race, and to end up with uniformity, the cause of decadence; to have known the excellent and to repudiate it for the middling: oh, my Sphex-wasps, it would be stupid if the theory of evolution were correct!
To avoid insulting you and also from respect for common sense, I prefer therefore to believe that, if in our days you confine your hunting to a single kind of game, it is because you have never known any other. I prefer to believe that your common ancestress, your precursor, whether her tastes were simple or complex, is a pure chimera, for, if they were any relationship between you, having tested everything in order to arrive at the actual food of each species, having eaten everything and found it grateful to the stomach, you would now, from first to last, be unprejudiced consumers, omnivorous progressives. I prefer to believe, in short, that the theory of evolution is powerless to explain your diet. This is the conclusion drawn from the dining-room installed in my old sardine-box.
