When the mourning widow, the eternal Isis, ever reproducing herself in eternal anguish, was snatched from her beloved Osiris, she reposed her hope of a future reunion on the sacred beetle, and hushed her sobs.
What is death? What is life? What is the awakening, or what the slumber? Do you not see this little miracle, this dumb confidant of the grave, which makes us the mock of destiny? It sleeps in the egg, and afterwards sleeps again in the nymph. It is thrice born; and it dies thrice—as larva, nymph, and beetle. In each of these existences the larva or mask is the prefigurement of the succeeding existence. It prepares, begets, and hatches itself. From the most repulsive sepulchre it emerges sparkling. On the dust it shines; on the gray Egyptian plain, in its season of aridity, it shimmers, and eclipses everything. Its jewelled wing mirrors the all-powerful sun.
Where was it? In the foul shadow, in night and death. A deity has summoned it forth, and will yet do much more for this beloved soul! Sweet, tender ray! The hope was surely founded upon justice, on the impartial love of the Creator of all life.
Accordingly, the widow draws from its death the brilliant pledge of the future, and gives utterance to this woman's cry:—"Merciful Heaven! do for my husband and for me what thou hast done for the insect. Do not grant less to man; do not grant to my best-beloved less than thou accordest to this brother of the gnat!"
Has modern science swept away the ancient poesy? Has it completely eliminated the miraculous from nature?
The inaugurator of this science, Swammerdam, has discovered that the grub already contains the nymph; nay more, even the butterfly. In the grub he has detected the rudiment of the wing and proboscis of the future being.
This is not all. Malpighi saw the nymph of the silkworm in its virgin slumber, already furnished with the attributes of its coming maternity,—containing the eggs which, as a butterfly, it would fecundate.
And yet again, this is not all. Réaumur, in the oak-grub, in a grub scarcely a few hours old, found the eggs of the future butterfly. In other words, the infant insect, at that very stage when the grub itself, as Harvey points out, is simply a mobile egg, already possesses eggs and children.
It is the identity of three beings. It seems as if there could be no intermediary deaths; one single life is continuously carried on.