Wholesale agriculture and vegetable abundance favour our rival the insect.
This is the immanent law.

Nature, with an equal zeal, offers her mighty breast to all her nurslings alike; to those who live by the goods of others no less than to the producers.

For us, who plough, sow, and reap, and weary ourselves with labour, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it also for the little Calender-beetle, which, although exempted from the labour of the fields, enters our granaries none the less, and there, with its pointed beak, nibbles our wheat, grain by grain, to the husk.
For us, who dig, weed, and water, bent with fatigue and burned by the sun, she swells the pods of the pea; she swells them also for the weevil, which does no gardener's work, yet takes its share of the harvest at its own hour, when the earth is joyful with the new life of spring.
Let us follow the manoeuvres of this insect which takes its tithe of the green pea.

I, a benevolent ratepayer, will allow it to take its dues; it is precisely to benefit it that I have sown a few rows of the beloved plant in a corner of my garden.

Without other invitation on my part than this modest expenditure of seed-peas it arrives punctually during the month of May.