IX.—THE BEES: ON THE WING.CHAPTER IX.HOW THE BEES CREATE THE PEOPLE AND THE COMMON MOTHER.In the life of the bees, all things are brought to bear on the welfare of the infant. Let us see, then, this object of love. Let us see what is lying at the bottom of the cell; her who has just been created, the little virgin of toil.She is born in a condition of singular purity; so much so that she is not even provided with the organ of the inferior necessities. On a delicate mixture of honey and flower dust, which is constantly renewed, you see nothing at first but a comma, then a C, a spiral. But she already lives, is organized, and active; so that on the eighth day, like a skilful spinner, she weaves her network of metamorphosis.Her nurses, that she may enjoy a complete repose at the sacred moment, take the precaution to close up her cell; erecting over it a little dome, velvety, and of a tawny colour. For ten days she is a nymph, enveloped in a veil of exceedingwhiteness and great delicacy, through which you can discern a miniature of mouth, eyes, wings, and feet. Twenty-one days suffice for her development. Then she scratches an opening in the little dome, and thrusts through it her head; next, with her fore-feet resting on the rim, she strenuously endeavours to disengage her whole body. It is a great effort; but the honey is close at hand to recruit her energies. At the first cell she falls in with she plunges into it her proboscis, and initiates herself into life.She is still humid, gray, and very weak. So she hastens to get dry in the sun, to harden her soft and rumpled wings. There she is welcomed by her numerous kinswomen, who stroke and lick her amorously, and bestow on her a maternal kiss.No creature is more richly endowed with implements, or more obviously intended for an industrial speciality. Each organ reads her its lesson, and informs her what she has to do. Lighted by five eyes and guided by a couple of antennæ, she carries in front, projecting beyond her mouth, an unique and marvellous instrument of taste,—the proboscis, or long external tongue,—which is of peculiar delicacy, and partly hairy that it may the more readily absorb and imbibe. Protected, when at rest, by a beautiful scaly sheath, the proboscis puts forth its fine point to touch a liquid; and this point wetted, draws it back into its mouth, where lies the internal tongue, a subtle judge of sensation, and the final authority.To this delicate apparatus add some coarser attributes which indicate their own uses: hairs on every side to catch up the dust of the flowers, brushes on the thighs to sweep together the scattered harvest, and panniers to compress it into pellets of many colours. All these conjoined form the insignia of her trade.—Go, my daughter, and become a reaper!Thou wilt desire nothing else, and thou wilt be fit for nothing else. The fairy virgins who prepared thy cradle, and feed thee daily, will bring thee up to be what they have been. Sober, laborious, and sterile, they practise a rigid economy; in them and in thee they maintain the pure flame of virginity by fasting, or at least by very scanty nourishment, while they banquet splendidly the future mother, thoughstill a child, and are lavish towards the numerous, and, for the most part, useless tribe of males.It is here we reach the fundamental strata of the City, the aristocracy of devotion and intelligence. The wax-makers, or bee-architects, if they consulted the wishes of the living queen, would never train up an heiress to her throne. She is blindly jealous, and as soon as the successor is born would have her put to death. They do not listen. Those firm sage heads, remembering that we all die, take counsel on the necessity of perpetuating the race. And, accordingly, by the side of the cells, or close little cradles which receive all the children of the republic, they build some spacious chambers, fifteen, nay, twenty times larger, in which the ordinary egg, favoured by the conditions of ease and liberty, may enlarge and develop at will all its natural faculties. The more certainly to ensure the superior growth of the chosen egg, they prodigalize upon it a stronger and more generous food, which shall give full liberty to its sex, and endow it with fecundity. Such is the efficacy of this potent liquor, that if the nurses accidentally let fall a drop or two on the neighbouring cradles, the little bees, rejoicing in the chance, participate in the queen-mother's fecundity, although in an inferior degree.Madam,Kings I have made, but never willed to be one.[J'ai fait des rois, madame, et n'ai pas voulu l'être.]This dramatic line perfectly characterizes the disinterestedness of these prudent nurses. They bestow all the world's gifts on their favourite,—a beautiful and ample habitation, a superior regimen, and that paradise of women—motherhood!To the others, on the contrary,—to their sisters, who are born resembling them,—narrow cradles, coarse food, incessant work, and pain! These will go into the fields to sweat for the people and the mother; those, confined at home, will build incessantly, and attend to the young. No recreation is allowed to them; I do not think they have, like the ants, fêtes and gymnastic games. Their entire feast will be labour (from which the queen-mother is excused).To one alone they give love, and for themselves preserve nothing but wisdom.The characteristic attribute of this child of grace, of whom the whole multitude is enamoured, is certain beautiful long legs of gold, or rather of transparent amber, of a gilded yellow. This rich colour lends nobility to her belly, and is also found on the edge of her dorsal rings. Elegant,svelte, and noble, she is freed from the drudgery of dragging the industrial apparatus which overloads the worker,—brushes and panniers. Like all the bees, she carries a sword,—I mean the sting,—but never uses it except in a personal combat; nor has she many occasions, being so surrounded, beset, and overwhelmed with an excess of love.This mother is very timorous, a trifle is sufficient to terrify her; at the slightest danger she takes to flight, and conceals herself at the bottom of the hive. Her head is not very large, and the unique function which so distinguishes her, is not one of those which tend to expand the brain. The others have more opportunity of acquiring knowledge and varying their accomplishments. The little gleaners gather a wide experience Of the country and of life. The bee-architects, who, moreover, attend to a thousand unforeseen domestic affairs, are compelled to think and develop their intelligence. The mother has but two duties to fulfil.On a sunny day in spring, about three hours after noon, she issues forth, and out of a myriad males or more she selects a spouse, carries him off a moment on her wings, and then rejects him, mutilated; he does not survive his felicity. She re-enters her hive, and all is ended. She is impregnated for four years, the ordinary term of her existence. No loves can be briefer or more chaste. All her toil, by day and night, without distinction of season,—except for three months of lethargy in rigorous winters,—is to lay eggs everywhere, and without cessation. She flies from cellule to cellule, and in each deposits an egg. Nothing more is required of her. She was born for this destiny, and her people prosper in proportion to her fecundity. If she fell barren, all would languish,—as well as the activity, the labour, and the love whichevery one bestows upon her. The sentiment displayed towards her is not so much of a personal character as the idea of utility, of the preservation and perpetuity of the people, which very visibly prevails.This mother, say our authors, has a somewhat giddy head. Like all individuals who have nothing to do, she is volatile and capricious. At the end of a year's incubation and sedentary life in the depths of the hive, a desire seizes her for the open air, to see a little of the world, to visit new countries. She has, nevertheless, a more serious motive than they say. She sees the spacious chambers which are being built for the young mothers who will replace her. She feels that her rivals are concealed there, and grows fiercely jealous. Incessantly she prowls around, and but for the assiduous guard which protects them, and keeps her away, she would dart her sting through the thin partitions. Conceive, then, what must be her rage when the young captives, ignorant of her fury and their danger, make imprudent efforts to escape from their cradles, hum and sing aloud their little cicala song, which is peculiar to the mother of the bees, and so clearly announces to the queen the presence of the pretenders? The foresight of the bees, which, to guard against all accidents, has thus reared up the young mothers, involves them then in difficulty. A frightful combat impends, a wholesale massacre; the old queen-mother, were she allowed, would not spare one of those odious females. Separation is preferable to civil war. The aged sovereign, agitated and distraught, runs everywhere, and seems to say: "Let those who love me, follow me." She raises a song of departure, and all labour is suspended.Determined to follow her, numbers of the bees make the necessary preparations, and eat a supply of food which will last them several days. The excessive agitation is manifested by a sudden change of temperature; from 28° C., the heat of the hive mounts up to 30° or 32°,—a condition of things intolerable to the bees, for to respire easily is a peculiar feature of their organization. In the extreme heat they are all bathed in sweat. Therefore they must either set out or die. The mother sallies forth, and they rush headlong after her. They buzz and whirl for a moment round the abandoned home, and then dart alittle further away, describing in the air the most fantastic and incredible flights. The air is darkened with them. At length some settle upon the branch of a neighbouring tree, then numerous others take their places, along with the queen. They cling to one another, and droop downwards in a large cluster. Tranquillity is re-established. The other bee communities having taken the alarm, and fearing the invasion of the fugitives, have guarded their gates, and reinforced their ordinary posts; but now, seeing them settled, they breathe freely, and return to their occupations.Meanwhile some prudent and faithful messengers are despatched from the cluster to examine the neighbouring localities best adapted for a new establishment. M. Debeauvoys was the first to observe this act of prudence, this special and prudent mission of inspection for the information and guidance of the new colony. A hollow tree, or a cavity in the rock, protected from the north wind, and near a brook where they can conveniently drink, are the conditions which weigh most with our prudent emigrants. A hive fully prepared and already furnished with honey they do not regard with indifference. They are very decisive in their movements, being directed by an excellent sense.Shall we affirm that they have quitted without regret the native land where they toiled so successfully? And that, having once forsaken it, they think of it no more? By no means. Themother especially,—"giddy" as they call her,—has her fancies for return, and twice—nay, thrice—persists in going back, carrying with her the too devoted colony.What would befall if, in these home-visits, she found herself face to face with the new queen whom the non-emigrating people have substituted in her place? There would be a combat. And this, too, happens without emigration, when, spite of all the efforts that are made to prevent her, a young mother, having forced her way through the wall of her apartment, reveals to the old queen the detested object of her jealousy. A duel then infallibly takes place. However, as each knows the other to be armed with a mortal dart, their natural cowardice would moderate their fury, and limit the struggle to a few harmless shocks, and an innocent wrestle, like the pugilistic display of paid athletes. But the people who gather round and look on from a near point of view are very grave, and mean the affair to be so. Division in the community would be the greatest of all evils. Moreover, they are so economical and temperate for themselves, so parsimonious for others, that they take into consideration, I am sure, the enormous cost that would result from the establishment of a couple of queens. Each one of them, royally nourished as they are, is a serious trouble to the republic. The State would be ruined if it had to pay a double budget. Therefore one of them must die. And hence arises a strange spectacle, completely characteristic of the singular spirit of this people: the object of adoration, recently gorged, and brushed, and caressed,—if she recoil, is led back to the combat, is impelled and driven into it, until one of the two antagonists contrives to leap upon the other, and from its bended and superjacent abdomen plunges into the latter's entrails the irremissible poignard.Unity is thus secured. The survivor, who, if conquered, would have been flung aside without regret, now that she is victorious becomes the idol and living deity of the commonwealth; but let her remember, on the express condition of perpetuating the people and proving continuously prolific.Let us suppose a deplorable misfortune,—that every mother has perished. What then becomes of the orphaned world? Does it fall,as some have asserted, into complete demoralization? Does such a calamity entail a furious anarchy, a universal pillage of the people by the people themselves? By no means, says M. Debeauvoys. A few hours of trouble, pain, wrath, and apparent delirium follow. The bees flutter to and fro in great agitation, and suspend their work; for a moment they even neglect the nurslings. But a people so grave and dignified at bottom soon resume their dignity, and remember what they owe to themselves. The mother is dead? Long live the mother! We know how to create another. What we were yesterday, so are we to-day.The last will be first. They turn to the youngest child of the people, who has barely opened her shell, who has not had time to undergo the confinement of a narrow cradle, who has not yet grown lean on the scanty fare of an artisan. This fare is not honey, but merely the dust of flowers which naturalists callbees' bread. Those who have been previously fed upon poorer fare will remain little; they no longer possess the faculty of transformation.But this young bee, so soft and so tender, will become whatever you will; and in order that she may develop into a true female, a bee of love, and a prolific mother, what is necessary? Liberty. Let them provide her with a vast cradle where her young life may float, and agitate, and develop, at ease. It will cost three cradles destroyed to provide for hers, and the lives of three infants, who will perish before birth; but what matter, if in a year she supplies the nation with ten thousand?The consecration of the mother of the people is that living nourishment which the people extract from themselves, and in which they mingle their bee-sweetness with the balmy essence of the flowers. A strong and noble nourishment, rich in the intoxicating perfume of aromatic herbs, richer in the virginal love concentrated upon it by thirty thousand sisters for the behoof of the marvellous child who belongs to them all.On the third day the child sees its cradle extended by an ornament intended to make it still freer,—a pyramid reversed. On the fifth only do they seal it up, to the intent that she may sleep peacefully, andaccomplish her metamorphosis in peace. And then the anxiety increases. They guard the beloved sleeper who will be to-morrow the common soul, and will inspire by her love the labours of the people. They guard her, and they wait upon her, but with the haughty dignity of a people who adore only their own handiwork, chosen by them, nourished by them, created by them, and to be unmade by them. It is their pride that at need they know how to create a god.CONCLUSION.Conclusion.The bee and the ant reveal to us the lofty harmony of the insect.Both, in their high intelligence, are of superior rank as artists, architects, and the like. The bee is more, a geometer; the ant is before all remarkable as an educator.The ant is frankly and strongly republican, having no need of a living and visible symbol of the community, lightly esteeming and governing with sufficient rudeness the soft and feeble females who perpetuate the race. The bee, on the other hand, more tender apparently, or less reasoning and more imaginative, finds a moral support in the worship of the common mother. For her community of virgins it is, so to speak, a religion of love.Among both the ants and bees maternity is the social principle; but fraternity also takes root, flourishes, and springs to a glorious stature.Our book, begun in a profound obscurity, terminates in a fulness of light.To form a correct judgment of insects, you must examine and estimate their achievements and their societies. If their organization rank so low as has been said, so much the more are they to be admired for accomplishing such noble works with such inferior organs.Observe that the most advanced works are executed by those (as, for example, the ants) who have no special implements to facilitate them, but must supply the want by skill and invention.Were they not so diminutive, what consideration we should extend to their arts and labours! Comparing the cities of the termites with the cabins of the negro, the subterranean galleries of the ants with the little excavations of our Tourangeaux of the Loire, how we should dwell on the superior skill of the insects! Is it stature, then, which changes your moral judgments? What are the proportions which will merit your esteem?Let us add, that if this book do not modify the opinion of the reader, it has greatly modified our own. This, in the course of our labour, has undergone a considerable change. We thought we were going to study things, and found themsouls.Close daily observation, initiating us into their ways and habits, developed in our minds a sentiment which animated our study, but also complicated it,—respect for their persons and lives."What say you? An ant's existence? Nature holds them cheaply, renews them incessantly, prodigalizes lives, sacrifices them to one another."Yes, but because she makes them. She bestows life and withdraws it; has the secret of their destinies, and that of the compensations in the course of possible progress. But as for us, we have no power over them, except to make them suffer.This is a grave reflection. We are not talking here of any childish sensibility. On the contrary, neither children nor men of science cherish any such feeling. But a man—man accustomed to reason with himself and estimate his acts—will not lightly deprive any creature of that gift of life which it is utterly out of his power to confer on the most insignificant. This consideration impressed us strongly. And at first a person, a woman, more impressionable and more scrupulous than myself, who had come hither with the design of making a collection of the insects of Fontainebleau, hesitated, deferred the task; and then, having interrogated her conscience, felt compelled to renounce it. Without uttering a word of censure upon scientific collections, which are absolutely indispensable, it is certain that we ought not to find a pastime in death. Note that many of these creatures are much less important in form andcolour than by attitude and movement, which cannot be preserved at the extremity of a pin!Our first discussion of this kind was in reference to the fate of a very remarkable butterfly (a sphinx, if I mistake not), which we caught in a net to examine for a moment. I had admired it for several days, coming and going among the flowers,—not, like most of its race, flying hap-hazard, but choosing them discreetly, and then, with a very fine, very long and arrowy proboscis, sucking by small sips, and very quickly withdrawing, as if acted upon by a steel spring. The movement was one of incomparable grace, of coquettish sobriety; just as if it said: "Enough for to-day,—enough! But, to-morrow!" I have never seen anything more graceful.It is only a gray butterfly, and not at all remarkable. Who that sees it dead would divine that, in charming nimbleness, it is the favourite of Nature, in which she has exhausted all her grace?We opened the net. And not long afterwards we had the pleasure of seeing the same butterfly, which, in bad weather, came one evening to take shelter with us, and found a resting-place in our chamber. In the morning, wishful to enjoy the sunshine, it flew away.I ought to add, moreover, that all the shipwrecked unfortunates of the latter end of autumn, guided by a very sure but very surprising instinct, willingly came to our house,—some on a temporary visit, others to remain with us. A young bullfinch, in a bad condition, and who had evidently met with more than one adventure, arrived all bewildered, and even on the first day ate from our hands. The same thing happened with a still more miserable creature,—a little tiny red-tail, which had been barbarously deprived of its head-feathers that it might be sold for a nightingale. This creature, so ill-treated by men, which might justly have been afraid of them, not only took at the very first the seed from our hands and lips, but would not sleep except on the mistress's finger.As for insects, their domestication is impossible. But many, nevertheless,seem able to live with man, to appreciate peaceable people and mildness of character. Last winter, two pretty red lady-birds had taken up their residence on our table, among our books and papers, which were being constantly moved about. What to give them, we knew not; they passed the whole season without eating, or appearing to receive any injury. The warmth of the apartment seemed agreeable to them.A strong September wind is now blowing, and, this very day, has cast in upon us a beautiful reddish-coloured caterpillar. Though she had not come of her own accord, but in spite of herself, we felt that we ought to respect misfortune. We did not know from what plant she had been torn, but supposed from her motions that she had been carried away at the moment she had begun to spin. We presented her with a variety of leaves; but none of them pleased her taste. She moved to and fro, displaying an extraordinary agitation. We supposed she wished to find rest upon a branch, but the rain fell in torrents. As many caterpillars and larvæ work underground, we brought it some earth. But this, too, was useless. Thinking she might like a web at a time when she was engaged in weaving, we placed her on the lace-work of a cushion which lay in the window; but the lace was cold and coarse, and did not please her. Moreover, the wind, the little wind which entered, would have cruelly frozen her during a whole winter. Finally, by a feminine marvel of intuition, we concluded that, since she was about to weave silk, she would like the silk-velvet lining of our microscope.Plainly, it was the very thing she herself would have chosen. Installed in the evening, by the morning she had made herself at home in this soft, warm, and sheltered place. She had already spun, and hastily extended her threads to right and left, as if fearing she might be disturbed. Then, during the day, her work having been respected, she saw that she had miscalculated her measurements, and that her cocoon was too short; she destroyed a third of it, to resume the fabric from that point on better proportions.Behold, then, microscope, and scalpel, and all our instruments expelled. What could we do? The confiding animal had taken up a position at our fireside, and would not withdraw from it. Life had driven out Science. Grave study, wait! for awhile thou art adjourned. During the winter we respected the sleep of the chrysalis.Illustrative Notes.Illustrative Notes.NOTE 1.The Meaning of this Book.—It has sprung wholly from the heart. Nothing has been given up to the intellect, nothing to systems. We have abstained from entering into scientific disputes.If the following formula should seem to you too systematic, pass over it. We have not sought to embody a dogma in it. We would only simplify, if possible, the point of view, and place it in the reader's power to embrace the whole significance of the book.The point of departure is violent. It is the gigantic and necessary war waged by the insect upon all morbid or encumbering life that might prove an obstacle to life. A terrible war, an infernal toil, which, ensures the safety of the world.This powerful accelerator of the universal passage should destroy like fire. But to secure the sharpness of action such a mission requires, it is necessary that its own transformations be accelerated, its life compressed; that from love to death, and death to love, it revolve in a burning circle. However brief may be this circle, it cannot be accomplished but at the cost of painful metamorphoses, which resemble a series of successive deaths.Among most insects, marriage means the death of the father; maternity, the death of the mother. Thus the generations pass away without knowing one another. The mother loves her daughter, anticipates her birth, often immolates herself for her sake, but will never see her.This cruel contradiction, this harsh denial which Nature opposes to the most pathetic aspirations of love, apparently inflames and irritates it. It gives everything unreservedly, knowing that it is for death. It draws from it two powers; on the one hand, unheardtongues of light and colour, ravishing phantasmagorias, in which love is not translated, but expands in rays, and pharos-fires, and torches, and burning sparks. It is the appeal to the rapid present, the lightning and the thunder of happiness. But the love of the to come, the foreseeing tenderness for that which not yet is, is expressed in another fashion by the astonishingly complex and ingenious creation of a storehouse of implements, whence all our mechanical arts have derived their most perfect models. Usually this grand apparatus of tools serves but for a day; it enables them at the moment they forsake the orphan to improvise the cradle which shall continue the mother, shall perpetuate the incubation when the mother ceases to exist.But how? Must she indeed perish? Can there be no exception to the pitiless law? In hot climates, especially, many mothers may survive. What if these mothers united together to deceive destiny, by associating so many brief existences in one common and lasting life in which their children should find an eternal mother?How shall we elude death?—Let us create society.The society of mothers. The insect is essentially a female and a mother. The male is an exception, a secondary accident,—frequently, too, an abortion, a caricature of an insect.The dream of the female—maternity, and the safety of her child—the preservation of the future—leads her to create the community, which secures her own safety.This society can only perpetuate itself by ensuring its existence against the season of sterility. Hence results a need of accumulation. Hence proceed labour and economy.But Nature, eluded by the effort and the toil,—I was going to say, the virtue,—does not lose its rights. Beaten on the one side, on the other it reacts upon the commonwealth, and grievously oppresses it. This self-protecting society, while rescuing immense multitudes from death and prolonging the common existence, multiplies the mouths to be fed, and is often overloaded. If its members would not die of famine, they must live on a very scanty regimen, must preserve alive a limited number of fertile females, and condemn the majority, or nearly the whole of the females to celibacy. Reared for virginity and labour, sterilized from the cradle in their maternal powers, they are by no means of barren intellect. The extinction of certain faculties seems to strengthen the others.Such is the institution, ingeniously severe, of aunts or adoptive mothers. With too little sexual feeling to desire love, they possess enough to wish for children, to love and adopt them. They are both less than mothers, and more than mothers. Should invasion or ruin befall the hive or the ant-hill, the true mothers consult their own safety in flight; the devoted aunts or sisters know no other thought but that of saving the children.Elevated by this factitious maternity and disinterested love above itself, the insect surpasses all other creatures,—even those which, like the mammals, are evidently superior in organization. It teaches us that organism is not everything, and that there is a potency in life which acts strongly beyond the range and in despite of the organs. Those species which, like the ants, have no special instruments to facilitate their work, are invariably the most advanced.The noblest work of the world, the most elevated goal to which its inhabitants tend, is the community,—by which I mean a society strongly consolidated. The only being, besides Man, who seems to reach this goal, is undoubtedly the Insect.No other creature approaches it. The most sublime and charming, the Bird, is, through these very qualities, also the most individual. Its society is the family; its community, the nest; its associations are only collocations of nests for the sake of security. Those mammals which, approach us so nearly, and impress us so strongly by their advanced organisation,—I mean, the beaver,—show wonderful powers of combination for the execution of their task; but, when the work is done, they retire to their own houses and families, isolated by the very tenderness of their domestic affections. The assembly of the beavers is, as it were, a colony of builders and engineers, where each one lives apart; but they are not citizens, and it is not a city.The city is only to be found in the insect world. Separated from man by many degrees in organism, the insect approaches him more closely than any other being in the supreme work of his life,—which is, to live for the many. Ithas not those touching signs of close relationship which render the higher animals so interesting to us. It has no blood; it has no milk. But I recognize it as akin by one loftier attribute: it has the social sense.An ignorant dogmatism had long asserted that the very perfection of these insect-societies depended on their automatism. But modern observation has proved, that if the conditions are varied, and unforeseen obstacles and difficulties placed in their way, they confront them with vigour and calm sense, and with the resources of an unfettered ingenuity,It is a world ofmethod, which, at need, can show itselfunrestrained.A world which, presently, in its original mission of combat and destruction, seemed to us an atrociously fatal force; but which afterwards, by the influence of its maternal devotion, became a world of social harmony, preaching a lofty morality.But ismaternityall? No; the community of life introduces the insect to the threshold of a still higher rank of sentiments. Even among those which are isolated—among the necrophori, for example, and the pilulary scarabæi—fraternalco-operation has a beginning. They render mutual services, and fly to the assistance of one another, co-operating in certain works. Among the sociable insects the feeling is carried to a considerable height; the bees feed one another, mouth to mouth, and stint themselves to supply their sisters. A very safe, and by no means romantic observer, saw an ant dressing the wound of another ant which had lost an antenna, by pouring on it some honey-dew to close it up and protect it from the air.See now how far we have advanced from our starting-point, where the insect appeared to us a pure voracious element, a machine of absorption.A great, a sublime metamorphosis, more marvellous than that of the moultings and transformations which guided the egg, the grub, the nymph, to the assumption of wings.It is a world strange to man, but singularly parallel to our own, though having no mutual mode of communication. We invent scarcely anything which has not previously—though for a long time unknown to us—been invented by the insect.What have the great animals discovered? Nothing. Apparently their warmth of life, and their red blood, obscure their mental light.On the contrary, the insect world, free from a heavy apparatus of flesh and blood intoxication, more subtly sensitive, and moved by a nervous electricity, seems a frightful world of spirits.Frightful? No. If terror sit at the threshold of science, safety is found in itspenetralia. At the first glance the living energy of the invisible may startle us; and with a shudder of alarm we may contemplate in the animalculethe likeness, some flashes of the individuality, or a certain undefinable something which seems like a counterfeit, of man.These gleams, which so troubled the great Swammerdam, and made him recoil with dread, are precisely the circumstances that give me encouragement. Yes; all see, all feel, and all love: a miracle truly religious! In the material infinite which deepens under my eyes, I recognize, for my reassurance, a moral infinite. The individuality hitherto claimed as a monopoly by the pride of the chosen species, I see generously extended to all, and conferred even upon the least. The gulf of life would have seemed to me deserted, desolate, barren, and godless, had I not everywhere discovered the warmth and tenderness of the Universal Love in the universality of the soul.NOTE 2.Our Authorities.—In a book which puts forward no scientific pretensions, the book of an unlearned writer dedicated to unlearned readers, we do not hesitate to confess that our method of study was very indirect. If we had commenced with subtle classificators or minute anatomists, or with dry manuals of instruction, perhaps we should have been checked at the first step. But we approached this science on its attractive side—through the great historians of the insect, who have united the delineation of its habits with the description of its organs. Our mind had received a strong and decisive blow (if we mayso speak) from the hooks of the two Hubers on the Bees and the Ants. The impression was so great, that thereafter we read with interest what one does not usually read continuously, Réaumur's six quarto volumes ofMémoires—an immortal book, which must always be a standard authority. Neither the contemptuous reaction of Buffon, nor the anatomical works, of superior exactness on special points, which have since been produced, should cause it to be forgotten. Réaumur was, as it were, the central point of our studies, and from him we went back to the illustrious masters of the seventeenth century, Swammerdam and Malpighi; next, we descended to those of the eighteenth, the Lyonnets, Bonnets, and Geers; finally, to our modern writers, Latreille, Duméril, Lepelletier, Blanchard,—to the fertile and audacious school of the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires and the Audouins, gloriously supported by Ampère and Goethe. While profiting by the noble treatises which sum up the main results of the science, like those of Lacordaire, we by no means neglected the admirable monographs of the present, century,—those of Léon Dufour (scattered through theAnnales des Sciences Naturelles, and other collections), the grand work of Walckenaër on the Spiders, the colossal labour of Strauss on the Cockchafer—a monument of the first class, which can only be compared to Lyonnet's treatise on the Caterpillar. As for details drawn from travellers, we shall hereafter have an opportunity of referring to them. We shall also acknowledge our debt to foreign writers,—to Kirby, Smeathman, Lund, and others. For the anatomy of the insect, as for general anatomy, we cannot too strongly recommend the admirable and usefully enlarged specimens prepared by our excellent master, Dr. Auzoux.NOTE 3.—Book i., Chap. iii.On Insect Embryos, Invisible Animalcules, Infusorias as the Predecessors or Forerunners of the Insect, &c.—The work of thevermetshas been observed, in Sicily, by M. de Quatrefages.—As for the microscopic fossils, the infusorias, &c., their greatcoup de théâtrehas been Ehrenberg's discovery. See hisMémoiresin theAnnales des Sciences Naturelles, Second Series, vols, i., ii.,vi., vii., viii. In volume i., p. 134, for 1834, he specifies the point at which Cuvier left the science, and how much his discovery has added to it.Upon the living world, upon the processes at present in operation for the creation of little spheres, on those humble constructors who accomplish such great things, we owe all our information to the English voyagers, the Nelsons,[S]the Darwins, and others. They are minute and very simple observers, generally timid in their assertions, which have been of the boldest character, they having seen the very heart of the mystery, and caught Nature in the act. Read Darwin (whose researches have been most ably summed up by Sir Charles Lyell) for information on the prodigious manufacture of chalk, divided alternately between the fishes and the polypes, which are building up islands with it, and will soon construct continents.[S]"Nous devons tout aux navigateurs Anglais, aux Nelson, aux Darwin," etc.England alone, that immensepoulpewhose arms enfold the earth, and who incessantlyfeelsand examines it, could observe it thoroughly in its distant solitudes, where at its ease it continues its everlasting procreation. The great theories formerly advanced in explanation of the cataclysms, epochs, and revolutions of the earth, will lose, perhaps, something of their importance. For we know now that everything is in a state of constant change.Does Europe perceive that quite a complete literature has sprung from Great Britain in the last twenty years? I describe it as an immense commission of inquiry into the condition of the globe, undertaken by the English. They alone could do it. And why? Because other nationstravel, but only the Englishreside. They daily recommence at all points of the earth the life-study of a Robinson Crusoe: and this is done by a crowd of isolated observers, led abroad by commercial speculation, and hence so much the less systematical in their inquiries.NOTE 4.—Book i., Chap. iv.(Love and Death.)On the Female Apparatus.—Réaumur,—and, in fact, every writer,—has admired the manner in which the weapons of war become the instruments of maternal love. M. Lacase, in a very beautiful thesis, the result of independent observations, and a continuation of the analogous works of an eminent master, Léon Dufour, has treated this subject with great anatomical preciseness. An original and important point of his labour is, undoubtedly, his demonstration, conformably to the views of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Serres, Audouin, and others, "that the very various armours which prolong the abdomen imply the modification, or even the sacrifice, of one or two of its posterior rings." Thus Nature apparently operates upon a fixed, amount of substance, only increasing one part at the expense of others, which are shortened or transformed.NOTE 5.—Book i., Chap. v.The Chilly Offspring of the Insect.—"But," the reader will exclaim, "what labour! How terrible a law of continuous efforts to be imposed on young beings, as yet but ill provided with tools, and without, that superb arsenal of implements which at a later stage we admire in the insect. How protracted are the means devised for their defence, which would be much sooner accomplishedif they were born less soft, a little firmer, and somewhat less impressionable."Yes; but in that case they would be just so far unfitted for the essential circumstance which ensures their development. Nature wishes them to be soft, ay, and very soft, that they may more easily undergo the moultings and painful changes which are imperative upon them,—which moultings, if the insect-substance were hard, would inflict upon it the most severe injuries. By instinct they are aware of this, and dread extremely lest their bodies should harden. Theprocessionarycaterpillars, for example, though covered thickly with hair, conceal themselves from the sun under ample curtains. And they are also mindful to issue forth only in the evening, when the damp and misty air may preserve their salutary humidity.NOTE 6.—Book i., Chap. vii.The Appearance of the Perfect Insect.—The anatomy of the insect has been the theme of one of the greatest disputes of our time. Some one having visited Goethe, soon after the French Revolution of July 1830:—"Well, well," inquired the illustrious sage, "have they settled the question?" And as the traveller seemed to think he referred to the political question, "Oh, it is something of far greater importance!" said Goethe; "I refer to the great duel between Cuvier and Geoffroy."The world took part in it. Strauss and others remained faithful to Cuvier. The great physicist Ampère, in an anonymous article inserted in the first volume of theAnnales des Sciences Naturelles, adopted the opinions of Geoffroy, Audouin, and Serres, and even expressed them with a juvenile audacity that these anatomists, in their modesty, had not displayed.All the complex details of their proceedings had been extracted and prepared [by Madame Michelet] for the present volume with a patience and persevering love such as could be inspired only by a true and tender religion of Nature. Barbarian that I am, I must sacrifice this arduous labour, which, perhaps, would not be much relished by the public to whom I address myself.The place which the insect occupies in the animal creation is very clearly defined in Lacordaire's excellentrésumé:—"Equal to the vertebrates in the energy of its muscular fibre, scarcely inferior to them in the organization of its digestive canal, superior even to the bird by the quantity of its respiration, it falls below the molluscs through the imperfection of its system of circulation. Its nervous system is less concentrated than that of many of the crustacea." (Lacordaire, vol. ii., p. 2.)Has the insect a brain? It is a disputed question. The nervous apparatus which, in the molluscs, has not found, so far, a centre, tends, it is true, in the insect, towards centralization. Two longitudinal strings of nerves, which run through the entire length of the body, abut on the nerves of the head, which are not massed as in the higher animal. In the wasp, however, has been discovered a firm, whitish substance, strongly resembling the brain. But this would seem exceptional. Even in the head of insects remarkable for their intelligence, you will find only simple nervous ganglions, not differing in any respect from those which compose the two threads.This inferiority of organization does but render more surprising the superiority of the insect in art and sociability to all other animals, even to the principal mammals (with a single exception). Here at the highest point of the ladder, there at the lowest, it occupies, on the whole, a middle place; and is, as it were, in the scale of existence, an energetic mediator between life and death.
IX.—THE BEES: ON THE WING.
IX.—THE BEES: ON THE WING.
CHAPTER IX.HOW THE BEES CREATE THE PEOPLE AND THE COMMON MOTHER.In the life of the bees, all things are brought to bear on the welfare of the infant. Let us see, then, this object of love. Let us see what is lying at the bottom of the cell; her who has just been created, the little virgin of toil.She is born in a condition of singular purity; so much so that she is not even provided with the organ of the inferior necessities. On a delicate mixture of honey and flower dust, which is constantly renewed, you see nothing at first but a comma, then a C, a spiral. But she already lives, is organized, and active; so that on the eighth day, like a skilful spinner, she weaves her network of metamorphosis.Her nurses, that she may enjoy a complete repose at the sacred moment, take the precaution to close up her cell; erecting over it a little dome, velvety, and of a tawny colour. For ten days she is a nymph, enveloped in a veil of exceedingwhiteness and great delicacy, through which you can discern a miniature of mouth, eyes, wings, and feet. Twenty-one days suffice for her development. Then she scratches an opening in the little dome, and thrusts through it her head; next, with her fore-feet resting on the rim, she strenuously endeavours to disengage her whole body. It is a great effort; but the honey is close at hand to recruit her energies. At the first cell she falls in with she plunges into it her proboscis, and initiates herself into life.She is still humid, gray, and very weak. So she hastens to get dry in the sun, to harden her soft and rumpled wings. There she is welcomed by her numerous kinswomen, who stroke and lick her amorously, and bestow on her a maternal kiss.
CHAPTER IX.
HOW THE BEES CREATE THE PEOPLE AND THE COMMON MOTHER.
In the life of the bees, all things are brought to bear on the welfare of the infant. Let us see, then, this object of love. Let us see what is lying at the bottom of the cell; her who has just been created, the little virgin of toil.
She is born in a condition of singular purity; so much so that she is not even provided with the organ of the inferior necessities. On a delicate mixture of honey and flower dust, which is constantly renewed, you see nothing at first but a comma, then a C, a spiral. But she already lives, is organized, and active; so that on the eighth day, like a skilful spinner, she weaves her network of metamorphosis.
Her nurses, that she may enjoy a complete repose at the sacred moment, take the precaution to close up her cell; erecting over it a little dome, velvety, and of a tawny colour. For ten days she is a nymph, enveloped in a veil of exceedingwhiteness and great delicacy, through which you can discern a miniature of mouth, eyes, wings, and feet. Twenty-one days suffice for her development. Then she scratches an opening in the little dome, and thrusts through it her head; next, with her fore-feet resting on the rim, she strenuously endeavours to disengage her whole body. It is a great effort; but the honey is close at hand to recruit her energies. At the first cell she falls in with she plunges into it her proboscis, and initiates herself into life.
She is still humid, gray, and very weak. So she hastens to get dry in the sun, to harden her soft and rumpled wings. There she is welcomed by her numerous kinswomen, who stroke and lick her amorously, and bestow on her a maternal kiss.
No creature is more richly endowed with implements, or more obviously intended for an industrial speciality. Each organ reads her its lesson, and informs her what she has to do. Lighted by five eyes and guided by a couple of antennæ, she carries in front, projecting beyond her mouth, an unique and marvellous instrument of taste,—the proboscis, or long external tongue,—which is of peculiar delicacy, and partly hairy that it may the more readily absorb and imbibe. Protected, when at rest, by a beautiful scaly sheath, the proboscis puts forth its fine point to touch a liquid; and this point wetted, draws it back into its mouth, where lies the internal tongue, a subtle judge of sensation, and the final authority.
To this delicate apparatus add some coarser attributes which indicate their own uses: hairs on every side to catch up the dust of the flowers, brushes on the thighs to sweep together the scattered harvest, and panniers to compress it into pellets of many colours. All these conjoined form the insignia of her trade.—Go, my daughter, and become a reaper!
Thou wilt desire nothing else, and thou wilt be fit for nothing else. The fairy virgins who prepared thy cradle, and feed thee daily, will bring thee up to be what they have been. Sober, laborious, and sterile, they practise a rigid economy; in them and in thee they maintain the pure flame of virginity by fasting, or at least by very scanty nourishment, while they banquet splendidly the future mother, thoughstill a child, and are lavish towards the numerous, and, for the most part, useless tribe of males.
It is here we reach the fundamental strata of the City, the aristocracy of devotion and intelligence. The wax-makers, or bee-architects, if they consulted the wishes of the living queen, would never train up an heiress to her throne. She is blindly jealous, and as soon as the successor is born would have her put to death. They do not listen. Those firm sage heads, remembering that we all die, take counsel on the necessity of perpetuating the race. And, accordingly, by the side of the cells, or close little cradles which receive all the children of the republic, they build some spacious chambers, fifteen, nay, twenty times larger, in which the ordinary egg, favoured by the conditions of ease and liberty, may enlarge and develop at will all its natural faculties. The more certainly to ensure the superior growth of the chosen egg, they prodigalize upon it a stronger and more generous food, which shall give full liberty to its sex, and endow it with fecundity. Such is the efficacy of this potent liquor, that if the nurses accidentally let fall a drop or two on the neighbouring cradles, the little bees, rejoicing in the chance, participate in the queen-mother's fecundity, although in an inferior degree.
Madam,Kings I have made, but never willed to be one.[J'ai fait des rois, madame, et n'ai pas voulu l'être.]
This dramatic line perfectly characterizes the disinterestedness of these prudent nurses. They bestow all the world's gifts on their favourite,—a beautiful and ample habitation, a superior regimen, and that paradise of women—motherhood!
To the others, on the contrary,—to their sisters, who are born resembling them,—narrow cradles, coarse food, incessant work, and pain! These will go into the fields to sweat for the people and the mother; those, confined at home, will build incessantly, and attend to the young. No recreation is allowed to them; I do not think they have, like the ants, fêtes and gymnastic games. Their entire feast will be labour (from which the queen-mother is excused).To one alone they give love, and for themselves preserve nothing but wisdom.
The characteristic attribute of this child of grace, of whom the whole multitude is enamoured, is certain beautiful long legs of gold, or rather of transparent amber, of a gilded yellow. This rich colour lends nobility to her belly, and is also found on the edge of her dorsal rings. Elegant,svelte, and noble, she is freed from the drudgery of dragging the industrial apparatus which overloads the worker,—brushes and panniers. Like all the bees, she carries a sword,—I mean the sting,—but never uses it except in a personal combat; nor has she many occasions, being so surrounded, beset, and overwhelmed with an excess of love.
This mother is very timorous, a trifle is sufficient to terrify her; at the slightest danger she takes to flight, and conceals herself at the bottom of the hive. Her head is not very large, and the unique function which so distinguishes her, is not one of those which tend to expand the brain. The others have more opportunity of acquiring knowledge and varying their accomplishments. The little gleaners gather a wide experience Of the country and of life. The bee-architects, who, moreover, attend to a thousand unforeseen domestic affairs, are compelled to think and develop their intelligence. The mother has but two duties to fulfil.
On a sunny day in spring, about three hours after noon, she issues forth, and out of a myriad males or more she selects a spouse, carries him off a moment on her wings, and then rejects him, mutilated; he does not survive his felicity. She re-enters her hive, and all is ended. She is impregnated for four years, the ordinary term of her existence. No loves can be briefer or more chaste. All her toil, by day and night, without distinction of season,—except for three months of lethargy in rigorous winters,—is to lay eggs everywhere, and without cessation. She flies from cellule to cellule, and in each deposits an egg. Nothing more is required of her. She was born for this destiny, and her people prosper in proportion to her fecundity. If she fell barren, all would languish,—as well as the activity, the labour, and the love whichevery one bestows upon her. The sentiment displayed towards her is not so much of a personal character as the idea of utility, of the preservation and perpetuity of the people, which very visibly prevails.
This mother, say our authors, has a somewhat giddy head. Like all individuals who have nothing to do, she is volatile and capricious. At the end of a year's incubation and sedentary life in the depths of the hive, a desire seizes her for the open air, to see a little of the world, to visit new countries. She has, nevertheless, a more serious motive than they say. She sees the spacious chambers which are being built for the young mothers who will replace her. She feels that her rivals are concealed there, and grows fiercely jealous. Incessantly she prowls around, and but for the assiduous guard which protects them, and keeps her away, she would dart her sting through the thin partitions. Conceive, then, what must be her rage when the young captives, ignorant of her fury and their danger, make imprudent efforts to escape from their cradles, hum and sing aloud their little cicala song, which is peculiar to the mother of the bees, and so clearly announces to the queen the presence of the pretenders? The foresight of the bees, which, to guard against all accidents, has thus reared up the young mothers, involves them then in difficulty. A frightful combat impends, a wholesale massacre; the old queen-mother, were she allowed, would not spare one of those odious females. Separation is preferable to civil war. The aged sovereign, agitated and distraught, runs everywhere, and seems to say: "Let those who love me, follow me." She raises a song of departure, and all labour is suspended.
Determined to follow her, numbers of the bees make the necessary preparations, and eat a supply of food which will last them several days. The excessive agitation is manifested by a sudden change of temperature; from 28° C., the heat of the hive mounts up to 30° or 32°,—a condition of things intolerable to the bees, for to respire easily is a peculiar feature of their organization. In the extreme heat they are all bathed in sweat. Therefore they must either set out or die. The mother sallies forth, and they rush headlong after her. They buzz and whirl for a moment round the abandoned home, and then dart alittle further away, describing in the air the most fantastic and incredible flights. The air is darkened with them. At length some settle upon the branch of a neighbouring tree, then numerous others take their places, along with the queen. They cling to one another, and droop downwards in a large cluster. Tranquillity is re-established. The other bee communities having taken the alarm, and fearing the invasion of the fugitives, have guarded their gates, and reinforced their ordinary posts; but now, seeing them settled, they breathe freely, and return to their occupations.
Meanwhile some prudent and faithful messengers are despatched from the cluster to examine the neighbouring localities best adapted for a new establishment. M. Debeauvoys was the first to observe this act of prudence, this special and prudent mission of inspection for the information and guidance of the new colony. A hollow tree, or a cavity in the rock, protected from the north wind, and near a brook where they can conveniently drink, are the conditions which weigh most with our prudent emigrants. A hive fully prepared and already furnished with honey they do not regard with indifference. They are very decisive in their movements, being directed by an excellent sense.
Shall we affirm that they have quitted without regret the native land where they toiled so successfully? And that, having once forsaken it, they think of it no more? By no means. Themother especially,—"giddy" as they call her,—has her fancies for return, and twice—nay, thrice—persists in going back, carrying with her the too devoted colony.
What would befall if, in these home-visits, she found herself face to face with the new queen whom the non-emigrating people have substituted in her place? There would be a combat. And this, too, happens without emigration, when, spite of all the efforts that are made to prevent her, a young mother, having forced her way through the wall of her apartment, reveals to the old queen the detested object of her jealousy. A duel then infallibly takes place. However, as each knows the other to be armed with a mortal dart, their natural cowardice would moderate their fury, and limit the struggle to a few harmless shocks, and an innocent wrestle, like the pugilistic display of paid athletes. But the people who gather round and look on from a near point of view are very grave, and mean the affair to be so. Division in the community would be the greatest of all evils. Moreover, they are so economical and temperate for themselves, so parsimonious for others, that they take into consideration, I am sure, the enormous cost that would result from the establishment of a couple of queens. Each one of them, royally nourished as they are, is a serious trouble to the republic. The State would be ruined if it had to pay a double budget. Therefore one of them must die. And hence arises a strange spectacle, completely characteristic of the singular spirit of this people: the object of adoration, recently gorged, and brushed, and caressed,—if she recoil, is led back to the combat, is impelled and driven into it, until one of the two antagonists contrives to leap upon the other, and from its bended and superjacent abdomen plunges into the latter's entrails the irremissible poignard.
Unity is thus secured. The survivor, who, if conquered, would have been flung aside without regret, now that she is victorious becomes the idol and living deity of the commonwealth; but let her remember, on the express condition of perpetuating the people and proving continuously prolific.
Let us suppose a deplorable misfortune,—that every mother has perished. What then becomes of the orphaned world? Does it fall,as some have asserted, into complete demoralization? Does such a calamity entail a furious anarchy, a universal pillage of the people by the people themselves? By no means, says M. Debeauvoys. A few hours of trouble, pain, wrath, and apparent delirium follow. The bees flutter to and fro in great agitation, and suspend their work; for a moment they even neglect the nurslings. But a people so grave and dignified at bottom soon resume their dignity, and remember what they owe to themselves. The mother is dead? Long live the mother! We know how to create another. What we were yesterday, so are we to-day.
The last will be first. They turn to the youngest child of the people, who has barely opened her shell, who has not had time to undergo the confinement of a narrow cradle, who has not yet grown lean on the scanty fare of an artisan. This fare is not honey, but merely the dust of flowers which naturalists callbees' bread. Those who have been previously fed upon poorer fare will remain little; they no longer possess the faculty of transformation.
But this young bee, so soft and so tender, will become whatever you will; and in order that she may develop into a true female, a bee of love, and a prolific mother, what is necessary? Liberty. Let them provide her with a vast cradle where her young life may float, and agitate, and develop, at ease. It will cost three cradles destroyed to provide for hers, and the lives of three infants, who will perish before birth; but what matter, if in a year she supplies the nation with ten thousand?
The consecration of the mother of the people is that living nourishment which the people extract from themselves, and in which they mingle their bee-sweetness with the balmy essence of the flowers. A strong and noble nourishment, rich in the intoxicating perfume of aromatic herbs, richer in the virginal love concentrated upon it by thirty thousand sisters for the behoof of the marvellous child who belongs to them all.
On the third day the child sees its cradle extended by an ornament intended to make it still freer,—a pyramid reversed. On the fifth only do they seal it up, to the intent that she may sleep peacefully, andaccomplish her metamorphosis in peace. And then the anxiety increases. They guard the beloved sleeper who will be to-morrow the common soul, and will inspire by her love the labours of the people. They guard her, and they wait upon her, but with the haughty dignity of a people who adore only their own handiwork, chosen by them, nourished by them, created by them, and to be unmade by them. It is their pride that at need they know how to create a god.
CONCLUSION.
CONCLUSION.
Conclusion.The bee and the ant reveal to us the lofty harmony of the insect.Both, in their high intelligence, are of superior rank as artists, architects, and the like. The bee is more, a geometer; the ant is before all remarkable as an educator.The ant is frankly and strongly republican, having no need of a living and visible symbol of the community, lightly esteeming and governing with sufficient rudeness the soft and feeble females who perpetuate the race. The bee, on the other hand, more tender apparently, or less reasoning and more imaginative, finds a moral support in the worship of the common mother. For her community of virgins it is, so to speak, a religion of love.Among both the ants and bees maternity is the social principle; but fraternity also takes root, flourishes, and springs to a glorious stature.Our book, begun in a profound obscurity, terminates in a fulness of light.To form a correct judgment of insects, you must examine and estimate their achievements and their societies. If their organization rank so low as has been said, so much the more are they to be admired for accomplishing such noble works with such inferior organs.
Conclusion.
The bee and the ant reveal to us the lofty harmony of the insect.
Both, in their high intelligence, are of superior rank as artists, architects, and the like. The bee is more, a geometer; the ant is before all remarkable as an educator.
The ant is frankly and strongly republican, having no need of a living and visible symbol of the community, lightly esteeming and governing with sufficient rudeness the soft and feeble females who perpetuate the race. The bee, on the other hand, more tender apparently, or less reasoning and more imaginative, finds a moral support in the worship of the common mother. For her community of virgins it is, so to speak, a religion of love.
Among both the ants and bees maternity is the social principle; but fraternity also takes root, flourishes, and springs to a glorious stature.
Our book, begun in a profound obscurity, terminates in a fulness of light.
To form a correct judgment of insects, you must examine and estimate their achievements and their societies. If their organization rank so low as has been said, so much the more are they to be admired for accomplishing such noble works with such inferior organs.
Observe that the most advanced works are executed by those (as, for example, the ants) who have no special implements to facilitate them, but must supply the want by skill and invention.
Were they not so diminutive, what consideration we should extend to their arts and labours! Comparing the cities of the termites with the cabins of the negro, the subterranean galleries of the ants with the little excavations of our Tourangeaux of the Loire, how we should dwell on the superior skill of the insects! Is it stature, then, which changes your moral judgments? What are the proportions which will merit your esteem?
Let us add, that if this book do not modify the opinion of the reader, it has greatly modified our own. This, in the course of our labour, has undergone a considerable change. We thought we were going to study things, and found themsouls.
Close daily observation, initiating us into their ways and habits, developed in our minds a sentiment which animated our study, but also complicated it,—respect for their persons and lives.
"What say you? An ant's existence? Nature holds them cheaply, renews them incessantly, prodigalizes lives, sacrifices them to one another."
Yes, but because she makes them. She bestows life and withdraws it; has the secret of their destinies, and that of the compensations in the course of possible progress. But as for us, we have no power over them, except to make them suffer.
This is a grave reflection. We are not talking here of any childish sensibility. On the contrary, neither children nor men of science cherish any such feeling. But a man—man accustomed to reason with himself and estimate his acts—will not lightly deprive any creature of that gift of life which it is utterly out of his power to confer on the most insignificant. This consideration impressed us strongly. And at first a person, a woman, more impressionable and more scrupulous than myself, who had come hither with the design of making a collection of the insects of Fontainebleau, hesitated, deferred the task; and then, having interrogated her conscience, felt compelled to renounce it. Without uttering a word of censure upon scientific collections, which are absolutely indispensable, it is certain that we ought not to find a pastime in death. Note that many of these creatures are much less important in form andcolour than by attitude and movement, which cannot be preserved at the extremity of a pin!
Our first discussion of this kind was in reference to the fate of a very remarkable butterfly (a sphinx, if I mistake not), which we caught in a net to examine for a moment. I had admired it for several days, coming and going among the flowers,—not, like most of its race, flying hap-hazard, but choosing them discreetly, and then, with a very fine, very long and arrowy proboscis, sucking by small sips, and very quickly withdrawing, as if acted upon by a steel spring. The movement was one of incomparable grace, of coquettish sobriety; just as if it said: "Enough for to-day,—enough! But, to-morrow!" I have never seen anything more graceful.
It is only a gray butterfly, and not at all remarkable. Who that sees it dead would divine that, in charming nimbleness, it is the favourite of Nature, in which she has exhausted all her grace?
We opened the net. And not long afterwards we had the pleasure of seeing the same butterfly, which, in bad weather, came one evening to take shelter with us, and found a resting-place in our chamber. In the morning, wishful to enjoy the sunshine, it flew away.
I ought to add, moreover, that all the shipwrecked unfortunates of the latter end of autumn, guided by a very sure but very surprising instinct, willingly came to our house,—some on a temporary visit, others to remain with us. A young bullfinch, in a bad condition, and who had evidently met with more than one adventure, arrived all bewildered, and even on the first day ate from our hands. The same thing happened with a still more miserable creature,—a little tiny red-tail, which had been barbarously deprived of its head-feathers that it might be sold for a nightingale. This creature, so ill-treated by men, which might justly have been afraid of them, not only took at the very first the seed from our hands and lips, but would not sleep except on the mistress's finger.
As for insects, their domestication is impossible. But many, nevertheless,seem able to live with man, to appreciate peaceable people and mildness of character. Last winter, two pretty red lady-birds had taken up their residence on our table, among our books and papers, which were being constantly moved about. What to give them, we knew not; they passed the whole season without eating, or appearing to receive any injury. The warmth of the apartment seemed agreeable to them.
A strong September wind is now blowing, and, this very day, has cast in upon us a beautiful reddish-coloured caterpillar. Though she had not come of her own accord, but in spite of herself, we felt that we ought to respect misfortune. We did not know from what plant she had been torn, but supposed from her motions that she had been carried away at the moment she had begun to spin. We presented her with a variety of leaves; but none of them pleased her taste. She moved to and fro, displaying an extraordinary agitation. We supposed she wished to find rest upon a branch, but the rain fell in torrents. As many caterpillars and larvæ work underground, we brought it some earth. But this, too, was useless. Thinking she might like a web at a time when she was engaged in weaving, we placed her on the lace-work of a cushion which lay in the window; but the lace was cold and coarse, and did not please her. Moreover, the wind, the little wind which entered, would have cruelly frozen her during a whole winter. Finally, by a feminine marvel of intuition, we concluded that, since she was about to weave silk, she would like the silk-velvet lining of our microscope.
Plainly, it was the very thing she herself would have chosen. Installed in the evening, by the morning she had made herself at home in this soft, warm, and sheltered place. She had already spun, and hastily extended her threads to right and left, as if fearing she might be disturbed. Then, during the day, her work having been respected, she saw that she had miscalculated her measurements, and that her cocoon was too short; she destroyed a third of it, to resume the fabric from that point on better proportions.
Behold, then, microscope, and scalpel, and all our instruments expelled. What could we do? The confiding animal had taken up a position at our fireside, and would not withdraw from it. Life had driven out Science. Grave study, wait! for awhile thou art adjourned. During the winter we respected the sleep of the chrysalis.
Illustrative Notes.
Illustrative Notes.NOTE 1.The Meaning of this Book.—It has sprung wholly from the heart. Nothing has been given up to the intellect, nothing to systems. We have abstained from entering into scientific disputes.If the following formula should seem to you too systematic, pass over it. We have not sought to embody a dogma in it. We would only simplify, if possible, the point of view, and place it in the reader's power to embrace the whole significance of the book.The point of departure is violent. It is the gigantic and necessary war waged by the insect upon all morbid or encumbering life that might prove an obstacle to life. A terrible war, an infernal toil, which, ensures the safety of the world.
Illustrative Notes.
NOTE 1.
The Meaning of this Book.—It has sprung wholly from the heart. Nothing has been given up to the intellect, nothing to systems. We have abstained from entering into scientific disputes.
If the following formula should seem to you too systematic, pass over it. We have not sought to embody a dogma in it. We would only simplify, if possible, the point of view, and place it in the reader's power to embrace the whole significance of the book.
The point of departure is violent. It is the gigantic and necessary war waged by the insect upon all morbid or encumbering life that might prove an obstacle to life. A terrible war, an infernal toil, which, ensures the safety of the world.
This powerful accelerator of the universal passage should destroy like fire. But to secure the sharpness of action such a mission requires, it is necessary that its own transformations be accelerated, its life compressed; that from love to death, and death to love, it revolve in a burning circle. However brief may be this circle, it cannot be accomplished but at the cost of painful metamorphoses, which resemble a series of successive deaths.
Among most insects, marriage means the death of the father; maternity, the death of the mother. Thus the generations pass away without knowing one another. The mother loves her daughter, anticipates her birth, often immolates herself for her sake, but will never see her.
This cruel contradiction, this harsh denial which Nature opposes to the most pathetic aspirations of love, apparently inflames and irritates it. It gives everything unreservedly, knowing that it is for death. It draws from it two powers; on the one hand, unheardtongues of light and colour, ravishing phantasmagorias, in which love is not translated, but expands in rays, and pharos-fires, and torches, and burning sparks. It is the appeal to the rapid present, the lightning and the thunder of happiness. But the love of the to come, the foreseeing tenderness for that which not yet is, is expressed in another fashion by the astonishingly complex and ingenious creation of a storehouse of implements, whence all our mechanical arts have derived their most perfect models. Usually this grand apparatus of tools serves but for a day; it enables them at the moment they forsake the orphan to improvise the cradle which shall continue the mother, shall perpetuate the incubation when the mother ceases to exist.
But how? Must she indeed perish? Can there be no exception to the pitiless law? In hot climates, especially, many mothers may survive. What if these mothers united together to deceive destiny, by associating so many brief existences in one common and lasting life in which their children should find an eternal mother?
How shall we elude death?—Let us create society.
The society of mothers. The insect is essentially a female and a mother. The male is an exception, a secondary accident,—frequently, too, an abortion, a caricature of an insect.
The dream of the female—maternity, and the safety of her child—the preservation of the future—leads her to create the community, which secures her own safety.
This society can only perpetuate itself by ensuring its existence against the season of sterility. Hence results a need of accumulation. Hence proceed labour and economy.
But Nature, eluded by the effort and the toil,—I was going to say, the virtue,—does not lose its rights. Beaten on the one side, on the other it reacts upon the commonwealth, and grievously oppresses it. This self-protecting society, while rescuing immense multitudes from death and prolonging the common existence, multiplies the mouths to be fed, and is often overloaded. If its members would not die of famine, they must live on a very scanty regimen, must preserve alive a limited number of fertile females, and condemn the majority, or nearly the whole of the females to celibacy. Reared for virginity and labour, sterilized from the cradle in their maternal powers, they are by no means of barren intellect. The extinction of certain faculties seems to strengthen the others.
Such is the institution, ingeniously severe, of aunts or adoptive mothers. With too little sexual feeling to desire love, they possess enough to wish for children, to love and adopt them. They are both less than mothers, and more than mothers. Should invasion or ruin befall the hive or the ant-hill, the true mothers consult their own safety in flight; the devoted aunts or sisters know no other thought but that of saving the children.
Elevated by this factitious maternity and disinterested love above itself, the insect surpasses all other creatures,—even those which, like the mammals, are evidently superior in organization. It teaches us that organism is not everything, and that there is a potency in life which acts strongly beyond the range and in despite of the organs. Those species which, like the ants, have no special instruments to facilitate their work, are invariably the most advanced.
The noblest work of the world, the most elevated goal to which its inhabitants tend, is the community,—by which I mean a society strongly consolidated. The only being, besides Man, who seems to reach this goal, is undoubtedly the Insect.
No other creature approaches it. The most sublime and charming, the Bird, is, through these very qualities, also the most individual. Its society is the family; its community, the nest; its associations are only collocations of nests for the sake of security. Those mammals which, approach us so nearly, and impress us so strongly by their advanced organisation,—I mean, the beaver,—show wonderful powers of combination for the execution of their task; but, when the work is done, they retire to their own houses and families, isolated by the very tenderness of their domestic affections. The assembly of the beavers is, as it were, a colony of builders and engineers, where each one lives apart; but they are not citizens, and it is not a city.
The city is only to be found in the insect world. Separated from man by many degrees in organism, the insect approaches him more closely than any other being in the supreme work of his life,—which is, to live for the many. Ithas not those touching signs of close relationship which render the higher animals so interesting to us. It has no blood; it has no milk. But I recognize it as akin by one loftier attribute: it has the social sense.
An ignorant dogmatism had long asserted that the very perfection of these insect-societies depended on their automatism. But modern observation has proved, that if the conditions are varied, and unforeseen obstacles and difficulties placed in their way, they confront them with vigour and calm sense, and with the resources of an unfettered ingenuity,
It is a world ofmethod, which, at need, can show itselfunrestrained.
A world which, presently, in its original mission of combat and destruction, seemed to us an atrociously fatal force; but which afterwards, by the influence of its maternal devotion, became a world of social harmony, preaching a lofty morality.
But ismaternityall? No; the community of life introduces the insect to the threshold of a still higher rank of sentiments. Even among those which are isolated—among the necrophori, for example, and the pilulary scarabæi—fraternalco-operation has a beginning. They render mutual services, and fly to the assistance of one another, co-operating in certain works. Among the sociable insects the feeling is carried to a considerable height; the bees feed one another, mouth to mouth, and stint themselves to supply their sisters. A very safe, and by no means romantic observer, saw an ant dressing the wound of another ant which had lost an antenna, by pouring on it some honey-dew to close it up and protect it from the air.
See now how far we have advanced from our starting-point, where the insect appeared to us a pure voracious element, a machine of absorption.
A great, a sublime metamorphosis, more marvellous than that of the moultings and transformations which guided the egg, the grub, the nymph, to the assumption of wings.
It is a world strange to man, but singularly parallel to our own, though having no mutual mode of communication. We invent scarcely anything which has not previously—though for a long time unknown to us—been invented by the insect.
What have the great animals discovered? Nothing. Apparently their warmth of life, and their red blood, obscure their mental light.
On the contrary, the insect world, free from a heavy apparatus of flesh and blood intoxication, more subtly sensitive, and moved by a nervous electricity, seems a frightful world of spirits.
Frightful? No. If terror sit at the threshold of science, safety is found in itspenetralia. At the first glance the living energy of the invisible may startle us; and with a shudder of alarm we may contemplate in the animalculethe likeness, some flashes of the individuality, or a certain undefinable something which seems like a counterfeit, of man.
These gleams, which so troubled the great Swammerdam, and made him recoil with dread, are precisely the circumstances that give me encouragement. Yes; all see, all feel, and all love: a miracle truly religious! In the material infinite which deepens under my eyes, I recognize, for my reassurance, a moral infinite. The individuality hitherto claimed as a monopoly by the pride of the chosen species, I see generously extended to all, and conferred even upon the least. The gulf of life would have seemed to me deserted, desolate, barren, and godless, had I not everywhere discovered the warmth and tenderness of the Universal Love in the universality of the soul.
NOTE 2.
Our Authorities.—In a book which puts forward no scientific pretensions, the book of an unlearned writer dedicated to unlearned readers, we do not hesitate to confess that our method of study was very indirect. If we had commenced with subtle classificators or minute anatomists, or with dry manuals of instruction, perhaps we should have been checked at the first step. But we approached this science on its attractive side—through the great historians of the insect, who have united the delineation of its habits with the description of its organs. Our mind had received a strong and decisive blow (if we mayso speak) from the hooks of the two Hubers on the Bees and the Ants. The impression was so great, that thereafter we read with interest what one does not usually read continuously, Réaumur's six quarto volumes ofMémoires—an immortal book, which must always be a standard authority. Neither the contemptuous reaction of Buffon, nor the anatomical works, of superior exactness on special points, which have since been produced, should cause it to be forgotten. Réaumur was, as it were, the central point of our studies, and from him we went back to the illustrious masters of the seventeenth century, Swammerdam and Malpighi; next, we descended to those of the eighteenth, the Lyonnets, Bonnets, and Geers; finally, to our modern writers, Latreille, Duméril, Lepelletier, Blanchard,—to the fertile and audacious school of the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaires and the Audouins, gloriously supported by Ampère and Goethe. While profiting by the noble treatises which sum up the main results of the science, like those of Lacordaire, we by no means neglected the admirable monographs of the present, century,—those of Léon Dufour (scattered through theAnnales des Sciences Naturelles, and other collections), the grand work of Walckenaër on the Spiders, the colossal labour of Strauss on the Cockchafer—a monument of the first class, which can only be compared to Lyonnet's treatise on the Caterpillar. As for details drawn from travellers, we shall hereafter have an opportunity of referring to them. We shall also acknowledge our debt to foreign writers,—to Kirby, Smeathman, Lund, and others. For the anatomy of the insect, as for general anatomy, we cannot too strongly recommend the admirable and usefully enlarged specimens prepared by our excellent master, Dr. Auzoux.
NOTE 3.—Book i., Chap. iii.
On Insect Embryos, Invisible Animalcules, Infusorias as the Predecessors or Forerunners of the Insect, &c.—The work of thevermetshas been observed, in Sicily, by M. de Quatrefages.—As for the microscopic fossils, the infusorias, &c., their greatcoup de théâtrehas been Ehrenberg's discovery. See hisMémoiresin theAnnales des Sciences Naturelles, Second Series, vols, i., ii.,vi., vii., viii. In volume i., p. 134, for 1834, he specifies the point at which Cuvier left the science, and how much his discovery has added to it.
Upon the living world, upon the processes at present in operation for the creation of little spheres, on those humble constructors who accomplish such great things, we owe all our information to the English voyagers, the Nelsons,[S]the Darwins, and others. They are minute and very simple observers, generally timid in their assertions, which have been of the boldest character, they having seen the very heart of the mystery, and caught Nature in the act. Read Darwin (whose researches have been most ably summed up by Sir Charles Lyell) for information on the prodigious manufacture of chalk, divided alternately between the fishes and the polypes, which are building up islands with it, and will soon construct continents.
[S]"Nous devons tout aux navigateurs Anglais, aux Nelson, aux Darwin," etc.
[S]"Nous devons tout aux navigateurs Anglais, aux Nelson, aux Darwin," etc.
England alone, that immensepoulpewhose arms enfold the earth, and who incessantlyfeelsand examines it, could observe it thoroughly in its distant solitudes, where at its ease it continues its everlasting procreation. The great theories formerly advanced in explanation of the cataclysms, epochs, and revolutions of the earth, will lose, perhaps, something of their importance. For we know now that everything is in a state of constant change.
Does Europe perceive that quite a complete literature has sprung from Great Britain in the last twenty years? I describe it as an immense commission of inquiry into the condition of the globe, undertaken by the English. They alone could do it. And why? Because other nationstravel, but only the Englishreside. They daily recommence at all points of the earth the life-study of a Robinson Crusoe: and this is done by a crowd of isolated observers, led abroad by commercial speculation, and hence so much the less systematical in their inquiries.
NOTE 4.—Book i., Chap. iv.
(Love and Death.)On the Female Apparatus.—Réaumur,—and, in fact, every writer,—has admired the manner in which the weapons of war become the instruments of maternal love. M. Lacase, in a very beautiful thesis, the result of independent observations, and a continuation of the analogous works of an eminent master, Léon Dufour, has treated this subject with great anatomical preciseness. An original and important point of his labour is, undoubtedly, his demonstration, conformably to the views of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Serres, Audouin, and others, "that the very various armours which prolong the abdomen imply the modification, or even the sacrifice, of one or two of its posterior rings." Thus Nature apparently operates upon a fixed, amount of substance, only increasing one part at the expense of others, which are shortened or transformed.
NOTE 5.—Book i., Chap. v.
The Chilly Offspring of the Insect.—"But," the reader will exclaim, "what labour! How terrible a law of continuous efforts to be imposed on young beings, as yet but ill provided with tools, and without, that superb arsenal of implements which at a later stage we admire in the insect. How protracted are the means devised for their defence, which would be much sooner accomplishedif they were born less soft, a little firmer, and somewhat less impressionable."
Yes; but in that case they would be just so far unfitted for the essential circumstance which ensures their development. Nature wishes them to be soft, ay, and very soft, that they may more easily undergo the moultings and painful changes which are imperative upon them,—which moultings, if the insect-substance were hard, would inflict upon it the most severe injuries. By instinct they are aware of this, and dread extremely lest their bodies should harden. Theprocessionarycaterpillars, for example, though covered thickly with hair, conceal themselves from the sun under ample curtains. And they are also mindful to issue forth only in the evening, when the damp and misty air may preserve their salutary humidity.
NOTE 6.—Book i., Chap. vii.
The Appearance of the Perfect Insect.—The anatomy of the insect has been the theme of one of the greatest disputes of our time. Some one having visited Goethe, soon after the French Revolution of July 1830:—"Well, well," inquired the illustrious sage, "have they settled the question?" And as the traveller seemed to think he referred to the political question, "Oh, it is something of far greater importance!" said Goethe; "I refer to the great duel between Cuvier and Geoffroy."
The world took part in it. Strauss and others remained faithful to Cuvier. The great physicist Ampère, in an anonymous article inserted in the first volume of theAnnales des Sciences Naturelles, adopted the opinions of Geoffroy, Audouin, and Serres, and even expressed them with a juvenile audacity that these anatomists, in their modesty, had not displayed.
All the complex details of their proceedings had been extracted and prepared [by Madame Michelet] for the present volume with a patience and persevering love such as could be inspired only by a true and tender religion of Nature. Barbarian that I am, I must sacrifice this arduous labour, which, perhaps, would not be much relished by the public to whom I address myself.
The place which the insect occupies in the animal creation is very clearly defined in Lacordaire's excellentrésumé:—"Equal to the vertebrates in the energy of its muscular fibre, scarcely inferior to them in the organization of its digestive canal, superior even to the bird by the quantity of its respiration, it falls below the molluscs through the imperfection of its system of circulation. Its nervous system is less concentrated than that of many of the crustacea." (Lacordaire, vol. ii., p. 2.)
Has the insect a brain? It is a disputed question. The nervous apparatus which, in the molluscs, has not found, so far, a centre, tends, it is true, in the insect, towards centralization. Two longitudinal strings of nerves, which run through the entire length of the body, abut on the nerves of the head, which are not massed as in the higher animal. In the wasp, however, has been discovered a firm, whitish substance, strongly resembling the brain. But this would seem exceptional. Even in the head of insects remarkable for their intelligence, you will find only simple nervous ganglions, not differing in any respect from those which compose the two threads.
This inferiority of organization does but render more surprising the superiority of the insect in art and sociability to all other animals, even to the principal mammals (with a single exception). Here at the highest point of the ladder, there at the lowest, it occupies, on the whole, a middle place; and is, as it were, in the scale of existence, an energetic mediator between life and death.