My discovery is not a recent one; it dates from the latter part of 1876. I did not reveal it then for a reason you will easily comprehend, and if it weren’t for Globo, surely our capital’s most interesting newspaper, I would not be revealing it now. The work I have come here to discuss with you still lacks a few final touches, verifications, and complementary experiments. However, when Globo reported that an English expert has discovered the phonetic language of insects, citing a study undertaken with flies, I immediately wrote to colleagues in Europe, and keenly await their responses. Since it is undoubtedly the case that, in the field of aerial navigation, so ably invented by our very own Father Bartolomeu, the names of foreigners have taken all the glory, while that of our compatriot is scarcely remembered even by his own people, I was determined to avoid the fate of that eminent Flying Priest, and so have come to this rostrum to proclaim loud and clear, to the entire universe, that long before that English expert, and far beyond the British Isles, I, a humble naturalist, discovered exactly the same thing, and made a much better job of it.

Gentlemen, I am about to astonish you, as I would have astonished Aristotle had I asked him: “Do you believe that a social order could ever be imposed upon spiders?” Aristotle would have replied in the negative, as will all of you, because it is simply impossible to believe that such a shy and solitary arthropod made for work alone and not for love, could ever be inducted into some form of social organization. Well, I have achieved the impossible.