But the true romance of the firefly is to be found neither in the strange fields of Japanese folk-lore nor in the quaint gardens of Japanese poetry, but in the vast profound of science. About science I know little or nothing. And that is why I am not afraid to rush in where angels fear to tread. If I knew what Professor Watasé knows about fireflies, I should feel myself less free to cross the boundaries of relative experience. As it is, I can venture theories.
*
The tremendous hypotheses of physical and psychical evolution no longer seem to me hypotheses: I should never dream of doubting them. I have ceased to wonder at the growth of Life out of that which has been called not-living,—the development of organic out of inorganic existence. The one amazing fact of organic evolution, to which my imagination cannot become accustomed, is the fact that the substance of life should possess the latent capacity or tendency to build itself into complexities incomprehensible of systematic structure. The power of that substance to evolve radiance or electricity is not really more extraordinary than its power to evolve colour; and that a noctiluca, or a luminous centipede, or a firefly, should produce light, ought not to seem more wonderful than that a plant should produce blue or purple flowers. But the biological interpretation of the phenomenon leaves me wondering, just as much as before, at the particular miracle of the machinery by which the light is made. To find embedded in the body of the insect a microscopic working-model of everything comprised under the technical designation of an "electric plant," would not be nearly so wonderful a discovery as the discovery of what actually exists. Here is a firefly, able, with its infinitesimal dynamo, to produce a pure cold light "at one four-hundredth part of the cost of the energy expended in a candle flame"!... Now why should there have been evolved in the tail of this tiny creature a luminiferous mechanism at once so elaborate and so effective that our greatest physiologists and chemists are still unable to understand the operation of it, and our best electricians impotent to conceive the possibility of imitating it? Why should the living tissues crystallize or build themselves into structures of such stupefying intricacy and beauty as the visual organs of an ephemera, the electrical organs of a gymnotus, or the luminiferous organs of a firefly?... The very wonder of the thing forbids me to imagine gods at work: no mere god could ever contrive such a prodigy as the eye of a May-fly or the tail of a firefly.
Biology would answer thus:—"Though it is inconceivable that a structure like this should have been produced by accumulated effects of function on structure, yet it is conceivable that successive selections of favourable variations might have produced it." And no follower of Herbert Spencer is really justified in wandering further. But I cannot rid myself of the notion that Matter, in some blind infallible way, remembers; and that in every unit of living substance there slumber infinite potentialities, simply because to every ultimate atom belongs the infinite and indestructible experience of billions of vanished universes.
[1] Professor Watasé is a graduate of Johns Hopkins. Since this essay was written, his popular Japanese lectures upon the firefly have been reissued in a single pretty volume. The coloured frontispiece,—showing fireflies at night upon a willow-branch,—is alone worth the price of the book.
[2] By the old calendar. According to the new calendar, the date of the Firefly Battle would be considerably later: last year (1901) it fell upon the tenth day of the sixth month.
[3] The term kagar-bi, often translated by "bonfire," here especially refers to the little wood-fires which are kindled, on certain festival occasions, in front of every threshold in the principal street of a country town, or village. During the festival of the Bon such little fires are lighted in many parts of the country to welcome the returning ghosts.
[4] That is to say, "Do I see only fireflies drifting with the current? or is the Night itself drifting, with its swarming of stars?"