All this is soon said; but it was long to do. How many attempts! What miracles of patience, of delicacy, of skilful management! In exact proportion as one descends the scale of littleness, the insufficiency of our means proves more and more embarrassing. We can touch nothing without breaking it. Our large fingers will hold no more: they cast a shadow, they throw obstacles in our way. Our instruments are too coarse to seize upon such atoms; therefore we refine them. But then how can we put the invisible point in an invisible object? The two terms in sight avoid us. Only one single passion—the unconquerable love of life and Nature, the undefinable, indescribable tenderness, a feminine sensibility directed by a masculine, scientific genius—could succeed in so great an aim. Our Hollander loved the tiny creatures. He dreaded wounding them so much that he spared the scalpel. He avoided as far as he could the steel, and preferred the firm but nevertheless the delicate ivory. He fashioned in it infinitely small instruments, sharpened by aid of the microscope, which would not work rapidly, and compelled the student to make his observations with due patience.
His tender respect for Nature found its reward. While still a youth, and a simple student at Leyden University, he had two strong holds upon her in her highest and lowest manifestations. He was the first to see and understand the maternity of the insect and the human maternity. The latter subject, so delicate and yet so grand—in which he laboured conjointly with his master at Leyden—I put aside: let us dwell upon the former. He dissected and described the ovaries of the bee: found them in the pretended "king;" and proved that she was a queen, or rather a mother. In like manner he explained the maternity of the ant; an all-important discovery, which revealed the true mystery of the superior insect, and initiated us into the real character of these societies, which are not monarchies, but maternal republics and vast public nurseries, each of which raises up a people.
The most general fact in the life of insects, and the great law of their existence, is the Metamorphosis. Changes which in other creatures are obscure, are in them exceedingly conspicuous. The three ages of the insect appear to be three creatures. Who would have dared to assert that the grub, with its heavy luxuriance of digestive organs and its great hairy feet, was identical with a winged and ethereal being, the butterfly?
He dared to say, and by the most delicate anatomy he demonstrated, that the larva, the pupa, and the butterfly represented three conditions of the same individual, three natural and legitimate evolutions of its life.
How did learned Europe welcome this novel science of metamorphoses? That was the question. Swammerdam, young and without authority, without any position in the academy or university, lived in his cabinet. Scarcely anything of his works was published during his life, nor even fifty years afterwards, so that his discoveries might circulate and advantage all, rather than himself and his fame.
Holland remained indifferent. Eminent professors in the University of Leyden were opposed to him; and took umbrage at the fact that a simple student placed himself by his discoveries on a level with them, or even above them.
The miserable and necessitous condition in which his father left him was not calculated to recommend him greatly in a country like Holland. In his costly labours he was supported by the generosity of his friends. At Leyden it was Van Horn, his professor of anatomy, who defrayed all his expenses.
At this epoch two illustrious academies were founded,—the Royal Society of London and the Académie des Sciences of Paris. But the former, specially inspired by the genius of Harvey, a pupil of Padua, turned its gaze towards Italy, and addressed its inquiries to the distinguished and very accurate observer, Malpighi, who furnished at its request the anatomy of the silkworm. I know not why the Englishmen turned aside from Holland, and did not also interrogate the genius of Swammerdam.
He was honoured only in France. It was here, in the neighbourhood of Paris, that he made the first public demonstration of his discovery. His friend Thévenot, the famous traveller and publisher of travels, collected around him at Issy different classes of savants, linguists, orientalists, and, before all, inquiring students of Nature. Such was the origin of the Académie des Sciences. One might justly say that the revelation of the illustrious Hollander inaugurated its cradle.