However humble the insect may seem in appearance, it is from the first independent of the immovable, expectant existence of all the inferior races. It is born entirely free from that communistic fatalism which merges the being of each in the life of all. It exists independently; it moves, goes, comes, advances or returns, changes its determination or its direction at pleasure, or in obedience to its wants, appetites, and caprices. It suffices for itself; it foresees, provides, defends, and boldly confronts the most unexpected chances.
In this, then, do we not discern, as it were, a first glimpse of personality?
The individual stands out from the mass. He shows himself all at once admirably provided with the instruments necessary for the support and sustenance of the individual existence. He is born greedy and absorbent. But this very absorbingness is exactly the service which Nature expects of him. It is his mission to purify and disencumber the world; to clear it of morbid or extinct animal matter, which acts as an obstacle to the growth of life; to save the latter from the consequences of its excessive fecundity, the danger of its abundance.
No other being, as we shall prove, exercises so great an influence upon our globe; no other throws itself into the condition of general existence with so vital an energy. But this extraordinary strength, in such disproportion to the size, bulk, and weight of the insect, is subject to a severe law; the rapid, absolute, and complete renewal, at each generation, of the individual.
Love implies death. To engender and to beget is to die. He who is born, by the very act of his birth kills.
This is a sentence common to all beings, but carried out upon none more literally than upon the insect.
In the first place, it is death for the father to love. It is indispensable that he should surrender all his powers, and exhaust the best part of his vitality; that he should perish in himself, to revive in him to whom he shall have transmitted his germ of resurrection.
And for the mother, too, in most of the insect species, the condemnation is the same. She will love, give birth, and speedily die. Love for her shall not have its prize and recompense. She shall not see her sons. She shall not enjoy the consolations of death in seeing herself survive in her image.
A great and harsh difference between this mother and the mothers of superior animals! The woman—or the female of the mammal—as a rule cherishes in her own body her beloved treasure, warms it with her own flame, and feeds it with her love. How envious would be the insect-mother, if she knew of this supreme maternal happiness! But she must seek of an ungenial nature, must demand of some other being—tree, plant, fruit, or perhaps the earth itself—that it will condescend to continue the work of her maternity. This is rigorous, but it is not cruel. Let us look at it seriously. If death separate the mother and the child, it is because they cannot live together; because they are strongly sundered by the opposite conditions of life and nutrition. The child, at first a lowly grub, larva, or worm, an obscure miner, a concealed nocturnal worker, must for a long time continue to feed upon the coarsest food, and sometimes even on death itself. She, the mother, who, winged and transfigured, has mounted to a higher life; and lives solely on the honied sweets of flowers,—how could she accustom herself to the shades, and the useful but abject circumstances in which her offspring grows strong? That which is salutary and vital for the tenebrous child of the earth would be fatal to an aërial mother, who has already fluttered in the warmth and genial light of heaven.