Those pests of dogs, the flea and hornet, are referred to in a passage already given, where the dog is seen snapping and scratching in agony. The butterfly was symbolical, during the Middle Ages, of the death and resurrection of the body. The various phases of its development are referred to by Dante; the caterpillar state, the latter referring to the cocoon of the silk-worm, furnishing a figure for the souls in Paradise, swathed in light; in one passage, backsliding Christians are compared to insects in a state of arrested development."
Dante's passage in the tenth canto of the Purgatorio, in which he compares man to the butterfly, who in this life passes through the caterpillar stage, passing in death, as it were, into the larval stage when in his coffin he is motionless and apparently dead, as the insect in its cocoon, yet finally reaching the glory of the resurrection in the winged butterfly stage, shows how well these medieval observers of nature had studied carefully aspects of nature which we are apt to think were holden entirely from their eyes. The passage would remind one of the story of the Jesuit, three centuries later, who, in [{358}] the early days of missionary work in this country, wondered how he would obtain a fitting word to express to the Indians the abstract idea of the resurrection of the body. The good Father finally recalled his Dante, and having found a caterpillar that had entered into the larval stage after having spun its cocoon and wrapped itself round with its shroud to lie down in what is a striking similitude of death, presented it to the Indians, and then having waited until the butterfly came out, asked them what they called this process, and applied the word for it to the resurrection. Dante says:--
"Perceive ye not we are of a wormlike kind,
Born to bring forth the angel butterfly,
That soars to Judgment, and no screen doth find?
Why doth your soul lift up itself on high?
Ye are as insects yet but half complete,
As worms in whom their growth fails utterly."
It is with regard to bees and ants, however, that Dante's observant love of nature and of natury study is especially to be admired. It is true, as has been often pointed out, that the older poets, of whom Dante was an assiduous and mindful reader, made use of figures with regard to bees, and Virgil, with all of whose works Dante was so intimately acquainted that nothing must have escaped him, devoted one of the four books of his Georgics to what is practically a treatise on Apiculture. In this most of the problems of bee raising are discussed. Lucretius, Lucan, and Ovid, all made use of this interesting insect for figures in their poetry. Dante might have obtained most of the references to the bee, then, from his reading. Prof. Kuhns is of the opinion, however, that some at [{359}] least of Dante's references to them are due to his observations, quite apart from his literary reminiscences with regard to their habits and instincts. He says:--
"There are certain touches in the Divina Commedia which seem to prove that Dante's use of them was not entirely conventional. In the wonderful passage where he stands contemplating
'La forma general di Paradiso,'
he saw the Blessed in the shape of a great white rose on the banks of the river of light; and the white-robed angels, with wings of gold and faces of flame, as they fly unceasingly back and forth from the seats of the saints to the effulgent river, are compared to bees, following their inborn instinct to make honey, flying from flower to flower, burying themselves in the chalice, and then rising heavily to carry their burden to their hives. In another passage their buzzing noise is compared to the noise of a distant waterfall;"--a touch of nature that could only have come from familiarity with the insects.
In is with regard to ants even more than bees that Dante's proclivities for nature study are most evident. When in the Purgatorio, in the twenty-sixth canto, Dante would describe the meeting of souls in Paradise who kiss each other as they speed on their way, he compares them to the ants who as they meet one another touch antennae, thus communicating various messages, and then go on their way. The passage is very striking because, as Dean Plumptre remarks, the picture drawn reminds one almost of Sir John Lubbock's ant studies, or the remarkable descriptions of ant life in Bishop Ken's Hymnotheo. Dante's lines are as follows:--
"So oft, within their dusk brown host proceed
This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet;
Spying their way, or how affairs succeed."