Total abstinence from food could be understood, if it were accompanied by inertia:  immobility is not life.  But the young Lycosae, although usually quiet on their mother’s back, are at all times ready for exercise and for agile swarming.  When they fall from the maternal perambulator, they briskly pick themselves up, briskly scramble up a leg and make their way to the top.  It is a splendidly nimble and spirited performance.  Besides, once seated, they have to keep a firm balance in the mass; they have to stretch and stiffen their little limbs in order to hang on to their neighbours.  As a matter of fact, there is no absolute rest for them.  Now physiology teaches us that not a fibre works without some expenditure of energy.  The animal, which can be likened, in no small measure, to our industrial machines, demands, on the one hand, the renovation of its organism, which wears out with movement, and, on the other, the maintenance of the heat transformed into action.  We can compare it with the locomotive-engine.  As the iron horse performs its work, it gradually wears out its pistons, its rods, its wheels, its boiler-tubes, all of which have to be made good from time to time.  The founder and the smith repair it, supply it, so to speak, with ‘plastic food,’ the food that becomes embodied with the whole and forms part of it.  But, though it have just come from the engine-shop, it is still inert.  To acquire the power of movement, it must receive from the stoker a supply of ’energy-producing food;’ in other words, he lights a few shovelfuls of coal in its inside.  This heat will produce mechanical work.

Even so with the beast.  As nothing is made from nothing, the egg supplies first the materials of the new-born animal; then the plastic food, the smith of living creatures, increases the body, up to a certain limit, and renews it as it wears away.  The stoker works at the same time, without stopping.  Fuel, the source of energy, makes but a short stay in the system, where it is consumed and furnishes heat, whence movement is derived.  Life is a fire-box.  Warmed by its food, the animal machine moves, walks, runs, jumps, swims, flies, sets its locomotory apparatus going in a thousand manners.

To return to the young Lycosae, they grow no larger until the period of their emancipation.  I find them at the age of seven months the same as when I saw them at their birth.  The egg supplied the materials necessary for their tiny frames; and, as the loss of waste substance is, for the moment, excessively small, or even nil, additional plastic food is not needed so long as the beastie does not grow.  In this respect, the prolonged abstinence presents no difficulty.  But there remains the question of energy-producing food, which is indispensable, for the little Lycosa moves, when necessary, and very actively at that.  To what shall we attribute the heat expended upon action, when the animal takes absolutely no nourishment?