Flight offers them but few chances; their best protection is night. And therefore they shun the light,—they live as they can under the ground, in the wood, or at least beneath the leaf. If this be true of the larvæ, the grubs, of what we call worms, we may say the same of the insect. For its first period (that of the larva) endures a considerable time, though its life as a nymph, and finally its third period, last but a very brief while. Numerous species (May-bugs, stag-beetles, and the like) have three to six years of a tenebrous existence, and only three months under the sun.
Even the insects which live longest in the sun, like the bees and the ants, work willingly in obscurity; are partial to the shadows of their hives and ant-hills.
We may assert as a general rule that the insect is the child of night.
Most insects shun the day. But how can they avoid the air? Even in hot countries, the contact of the variable atmosphere with a live nude body, whose epidermis is not yet hardened, becomes infinitely painful. In our severe climates, each breath of air must produce the sensation of piercing arrows, of a million of fine needles. What would it be, O Heaven, for a poor human fœtus to issue, after a week or a fortnight, from its mother's womb, and instead of peacefully undergoing the transformations which strengthen it, to be subjected to them in a naked condition and in open day? What would be its sensations on quitting its soft asylum, and falling into the cold air? Yet such must be those of the insect, when, soft, feeble, assailable, and penetrable everywhere, still almost floating and gelatinous to the eye, it experiences the cold, and the wind, and the shock of so many painful accidents.
Certain clothed species are a little better protected. Some are lodged in the heart of a fruit. Others (bees and ants) form a protecting community; but the immense majority are born solitary and naked.
Some of our readers, always well clothed and warmed, will say, I am sure, that cold is an excellent thing, which stimulates the appetite and strengthens the frame. But those who have been poor will very well understand my preceding observations. For my part, recollections of my childhood convince me that cold is, in all truth, a punishment; you cannot get accustomed to it; its prolongation does not render its effect less severe. How keen a joy I felt (in rigorous winters) at each thaw which released me from my agitated, terrified, and uneasy condition, and secured the happy re-establishment of the internal harmony!
I do not deny, however, that cold may not be a powerful tonic, which sharpens and braces up the mind, and draws from it fresh efforts of invention. Cold, as well as hunger—and perhaps hunger especially—is the great stimulus of the arts; hunger weakens, cold strengthens.
It is the powerful inspirer of infinite swarms of those chilly creatures which seek before all things, as soon as they are born, the means of covering themselves. They are not in want of food; nature has everywhere prepared for them an ample banquet. All the vegetable kingdom, and a great part of the animal, are at their disposal; they might live tender and indolent, as the child sleeps at its ease on the maternal placenta which nourishes its slothfulness. But the cold irritates them; the cold damp air deadens and paralyzes their entrails; finally, the light wounds them. They can enjoy no repose until they have secured a shelter. In the lowest grade of life the smallest grub becomes an artist, and by weaving, and spinning, and carving has soon contrived a robe, and, as with a second skin over her too sensitive epidermis, has covered her suffering nakedness. Happy she who finds herself placed at the outset on a prepared soil, a cloth of warm wool, a fine fur: she does not fail to make in hot haste, according to our human fashion, a pretty paletot fitted to her figure; which, nevertheless, she leaves a little loose, like economical mothers for their young growing children, in whose case the garb too large to-day will be tight and well-fitting to-morrow.
Those who on their birth come in contact with chill green leaves, and their lustrous glaze, are still more industrious. They practise arts which astonish the observer. Some raise enormous masses with imperceptible cables, and by mechanical processes analogous to those which were employed in removing and rearing the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde. Others cut out figures purposedly irregular, which the seam afterwards fits into its harmonious ensemble.