A great, a sublime metamorphosis, more marvellous than that of the moultings and transformations which guided the egg, the grub, the nymph, to the assumption of wings.
It is a world strange to man, but singularly parallel to our own, though having no mutual mode of communication. We invent scarcely anything which has not previously—though for a long time unknown to us—been invented by the insect.
What have the great animals discovered? Nothing. Apparently their warmth of life, and their red blood, obscure their mental light.
On the contrary, the insect world, free from a heavy apparatus of flesh and blood intoxication, more subtly sensitive, and moved by a nervous electricity, seems a frightful world of spirits.
Frightful? No. If terror sit at the threshold of science, safety is found in its penetralia. At the first glance the living energy of the invisible may startle us; and with a shudder of alarm we may contemplate in the animalcule the likeness, some flashes of the individuality, or a certain undefinable something which seems like a counterfeit, of man.
These gleams, which so troubled the great Swammerdam, and made him recoil with dread, are precisely the circumstances that give me encouragement. Yes; all see, all feel, and all love: a miracle truly religious! In the material infinite which deepens under my eyes, I recognize, for my reassurance, a moral infinite. The individuality hitherto claimed as a monopoly by the pride of the chosen species, I see generously extended to all, and conferred even upon the least. The gulf of life would have seemed to me deserted, desolate, barren, and godless, had I not everywhere discovered the warmth and tenderness of the Universal Love in the universality of the soul.
NOTE 2.
Our Authorities.—In a book which puts forward no scientific pretensions, the book of an unlearned writer dedicated to unlearned readers, we do not hesitate to confess that our method of study was very indirect. If we had commenced with subtle classificators or minute anatomists, or with dry manuals of instruction, perhaps we should have been checked at the first step. But we approached this science on its attractive side—through the great historians of the insect, who have united the delineation of its habits with the description of its organs. Our mind had received a strong and decisive blow (if we may so speak) from the hooks of the two Hubers on the Bees and the Ants. The impression was so great, that thereafter we read with interest what one does not usually read continuously, Réaumur's six quarto volumes of Mémoires—an immortal book, which must always be a standard authority. Neither the contemptuous reaction of Buffon, nor the anatomical works, of superior exactness on special points, which have since been produced, should cause it to be forgotten. Réaumur was, as it were, the central point of our studies, and from him we went back to the illustrious masters of the seventeenth century, Swammerdam and Malpighi; next, we descended to those of the eighteenth, the Lyonnets, Bonnets, and Geers; finally, to our modern writers, Latreille, Duméril, Lepelletier, Blanchard,—to the fertile and audacious school of the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires and the Audouins, gloriously supported by Ampère and Goethe. While profiting by the noble treatises which sum up the main results of the science, like those of Lacordaire, we by no means neglected the admirable monographs of the present, century,—those of Léon Dufour (scattered through the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, and other collections), the grand work of Walckenaër on the Spiders, the colossal labour of Strauss on the Cockchafer—a monument of the first class, which can only be compared to Lyonnet's treatise on the Caterpillar. As for details drawn from travellers, we shall hereafter have an opportunity of referring to them. We shall also acknowledge our debt to foreign writers,—to Kirby, Smeathman, Lund, and others. For the anatomy of the insect, as for general anatomy, we cannot too strongly recommend the admirable and usefully enlarged specimens prepared by our excellent master, Dr. Auzoux.
