A very pretty whim, to count the jewellery of his famous sonnets as second in importance to the nomenclature of a vegetable!  I in my turn was delighted with his ayacot.  How right I was to suspect the outlandish word of American Indian origin!  How right the insect was, in testifying, in its own fashion, that the precious bean came to us from the New World!  While still retaining its original name—­or something sufficiently like it—­the bean of Montezuma, the Aztec ayacot, has migrated from Mexico to the kitchen-gardens of Europe.

But it has reached us without the company of its licensed consumer; for there must assuredly be a weevil in its native country which levies tribute on its nourishing tissues.  Our native bean-eaters have mistaken the stranger; they have not had time as yet to grow familiar with it, or to appreciate its merits; they have prudently abstained from touching the ayacot, whose novelty awoke suspicion.  Until our own days the Mexican bean remained untouched:  unlike our other leguminous seeds, which are all eagerly exploited by the weevil.

This state of affairs could not last.  If our own fields do not contain the insect amateur of the haricot the New World knows it well enough.  By the road of commercial exchange, sooner or later some worm-eaten sack of haricots must bring it to Europe.  The invasion is inevitable.

According to documents now before me, indeed, it has already taken place.  Three or four years ago I received from Maillane, in the Bouches-du-Rhone, what I sought in vain in my own neighbourhood, although I questioned many a farmer and housewife, and astonished them by my questions.  No one had ever seen the pest of the haricot; no one had ever heard of it.  Friends who knew of my inquiries sent me from Maillane, as I have said, information that gave great satisfaction to my naturalist’s curiosity.  It was accompanied by a measure of haricots which were utterly and outrageously spoiled; every bean was riddled with holes, changed into a kind of sponge.  Within them swarmed innumerable weevils, which recalled, by their diminutive size, the lentil-weevil, Bruchus lenti.

The senders told me of the loss experienced at Maillane.  The odious little creature, they said, had destroyed the greater portion of the harvest.  A veritable plague, such as had never before been known, had fallen upon the haricots, leaving the housewife barely a handful to put in the saucepan.  Of the habits of the creature and its way of going to work nothing was known.  It was for me to discover them by means of experiment.

Quick, then, let us experiment!  The circumstances favour me.  We are in the middle of June, and in my garden there is a bed of early haricots; the black Belgian haricots, sown for use in the kitchen.  Since I must sacrifice the toothsome vegetable, let us loose the terrible destroyer on the mass of verdure.  The development of the plant is at the requisite stage, if I may go by what the Bruchus pisi has already taught me; the flowers are abundant, and the pods are equally so; still green, and of all sizes.