NOTE 17.—Conclusion, [p. 337].
A Feminine Intuition.—A great question of method which the future will clear up, is, to know how far woman will one day master the sciences of life, and to what extent the study of these sciences will be shared between the two sexes. If sympathy for animals, long and patient tenderness, the persevering observation of the delicatest objects, were the only qualities which this study demanded, it would seem as if woman ought to make the best naturalist. But the life-sciences have another and a far gloomier aspect, which repels and affrights; and it is so, because they are at the same time the sciences of death.
However, in this very century, the grand and leading discovery, all-important for the knowledge of the higher insects, belongs to a maiden, the daughter of a scientific naturalist of French Switzerland, Mademoiselle Jurine. She has found that the bee-workers, who were thought to be neuters (of neither the one nor the other sex), were really females, attenuated by their exceedingly narrow cradles and inferior regimen. Now, as these workers form nearly the whole people (except five or six bred as queens, and a few hundred males), it follows that the hive of twenty or thirty thousand bees is female. Thus the predominance of the feminine sex, the general law of insect life, has obtained its supreme confirmation. There are no neuters; neither among the bees, nor the ants, nor all the superior tribes of insects. The males are a small exception, a secondary accident. I feel able to assert that, on the whole, the insect is female.
Mademoiselle Jurine's discovery has also revealed to us the true character of the maternity of adoption, an admirably original characteristic of these insects, and the elevated law of disinterestedness and sacrifice which is the ennoblement of their communities.
An undoubtedly inferior, but still distinguished merit to that of accomplishing great discoveries, is that of representing animals to us by pen or pencil in their true forms, their movements, and the general harmony of the things with which they are associated. No art seems to belong more naturally to woman. A woman has commenced it.
The illustrious Audubon has won just admiration for his representation of the bird in its complete harmonies, its animal and vegetable medium, on the plants which feed, near the enemy which assails it. But it has been too generally forgotten that the model of his harmonious paintings, which present us with so true a picture of life, was furnished by a woman, Sybille de Mérian. Her handsome volume (Métamorphose des Insectes de Surinam, folio, in three languages, ed. 1705), was the first in which this admirable method was invented and skilfully applied.
She is called "Mademoiselle," though she was married. The name of "dame" was in her time still restricted to women of noble birth. And she remains "Mademoiselle;" is never cited except under her maiden name. Her books, from their pure science and great perseverance, give one the idea of a person lifted above the world of persons, and wholly devoted to art and nature.
I have dedicated to her a word or two, but without speaking of her life. A native of Bâle, the daughter, sister, and mother of celebrated engravers, and herself an excellent painter of flowers upon velvet, she long resided at Frankfort and Nurenberg. She experienced great misfortunes, her husband being ruined and having separated from her. She then sought refuge in a mystical society, analogous to that which had formerly consoled Swammerdam. The religious spark of the new science, the theology of insects, as a contemporary terms it, here produced a strong impression on her mind. She was acquainted with Swammerdam's great idea, the unity of metamorphoses, and with that which Malpighi had flung in the face of astonished Europe in his book on the silkworm: "Insects have a heart."
What! they have a heart, like us! Which, like ours, throbs and stirs at the impulse of their desires, their fears, or their passions! How touching an idea! How well adapted to influence a woman!—But is this a fact? Many long denied it, but doubt has been impossible since the truth was demonstrated in 1824 in M. Strauss's treatise on "The Cockchafer."