A certain skill in examination, and a choice of day and of light, are necessary. You cannot properly study the insect of the tropics and that of our colder climates on the same day or at the same hour. The former should be examined only in favourable weather, under a pure sky and a strong sun,—a vivid and genial ray, analogous to the light which bathes it in its own country. The other, frequently uninteresting to the naked eye, but of great beauty under the microscope, may reserve its grand illuminating effects for the evening, or for artificial light. Little is promised by the cockchafer, at first sight so coarse and prosaic in appearance. Yet its scaly wing, when submitted to the focus of the microscope, and well lighted up beneath the little mirror, so that it is seen by transparency, presents a noble winter stuff, a dead leaf, where meander veins of a very beautiful brown. And in the evening it becomes quite another thing: the yellowish part of the scale has got the best of it, and in the light shines forth like gold—(a poor comparison!)—the strange, magical gold of paradise, which we dream of for the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, or for the robes of light worn by saints and spirits before the Throne! A sun softer and tenderer than the orb of day, and one which, we know not why, charms and affects the heart.
A strange mirage! And yet nothing but a cockchafer's wing!
Perhaps it may next be an insect which neither by day nor night, neither to the naked eye nor under the microscope, could excite a feeling of interest; but if you take the trouble to lift up, with a delicate and patient scalpel, the laminæ which compose the thickness of its scaly wing, you will find there, in most instances, a variety of unexpected designs, sometimes vegetable curves,—sometimes airy ramifications,—sometimes angular striated figures, like hieroglyphics, which remind you of certain Oriental languages; and compose, in truth, a genuine necromancer's book, that can neither be referred to, nor compared with, any known form.
These singular characters, while strongly attracting the eye and disquieting the mind, are fully worthy of the interest they excite. What they express, and give utterance to, in their emphatic language, is the circulation of life. Some are tubes through which the air enters the wing, and distends it for flight; others are tiny veins where circulate the powerful liquids that endow the imperceptible organism with its colours and its energy.
The most attractive forms are living forms. Take a drop of blood, and submit it to the microscope. This drop, as it spreads, rewards you with a delightful arborescence,—with the delicacy and lightness of certain winter trees, when revealed in their actual figure, and no longer encumbered with leaves.
Thus, Nature's infinite potency of beauty is not limited to the surface, as antiquity supposed. It does not trouble itself about human eyesight, but labours for its own behoof, and on its own work. From the surface to the interior, it frequently increases in beauty as in depth. It invests with surpassing loveliness things which are absolutely hidden, and which death alone can unveil. Sometimes, as if to contradict and confound our ideas, it clothes in ravishing forms the organs which, from our point of view, accomplish the vilest functions. I am thinking of the exquisite beauty and delicate tenderness of that coral-tree which incessantly pours out the chyle of our intestines.