OUR STUDIES AT FONTAINEBLEAU.
I feel no surprise that our great initiator into the Insect World, Swammerdam, recoiled in affright when the microscope first afforded him a glimpse of it.
For the name of its inhabitants is, the Living Infinite.
Upwards of two hundred years men have laboured, simplifying in one direction, and complicating in another. The excellent treatises written upon this subject leave, among a multitude of partial illuminations, a certain feeling of being dazzled. Such is the impression which their study for some time produced upon us.
Ought I to flatter myself that I can render it clearer than my masters have done? By no means. But I discovered, through the incident which took place at Lucerne, and others of later date, that our enthusiastic and sympathetic ignorance could penetrate further, perhaps, into the meaning of the insect life than has been the lot of many scientific classificators.
The thought pursued me during the winter, but I could not verify any experiment at Paris; it was only at Fontainebleau that I worked out the truly simple formula about to be submitted to the reader, and obtained some tranquillity of mind, so far as this subject was concerned.
The place admirably favoured the then condition of my soul. All the painful circumstances of the time, by driving me back upon myself, increased my concentration. We constituted for ourselves a perfect solitude. Our chamber became for us an entire city. And outside there was nothing but a ring of wood, then tolerably small, which we traversed on foot.
This ring oppressed me a little in the great heats, when the sun shone reflected on the sandstone. But in these dry hot days the thought does not grow enfeebled. I could follow up and investigate mine with sequence and perseverance, enjoying—what is rare enough in life—a grand harmonious unity of ideas and sentiments, which I was by no means anxious to vary, but rather to deepen.
I went forth alone at noonday, and walked some distance into the dull, dumb, and sandy forest, which was without whisper and without voice. I carried thither my theme, and trusted to attain its meaning in that infinite of sand overlaid by an infinite of leaves. But how much vaster that infinite of animated life, the abyss of imperceptible organisms into which I was fain to descend!