330 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 



last reptiles and batrachians which a warm autumnal breeze has 

 restored to life. 



Page 188. My muse is the light. j^nd yet the nightingale loses 

 it when he returns to us from Asia. But all true artists require that 

 it should be softly ordered, blended with rays and shadows. Rem- 

 brandt in his paintings has exhausted the effects, at once warm and soft, 

 of the science of chiaro-oscuro. The nightingale begins his song when 

 the gloom of evening mingles with the last beams of the sun ; and 

 hence it is that we tremble at his voice. Our soul in the misty and 

 uncertain hours of the gloaming regains possession of the inner light. 



Page 215. Do not say, " Winter is on my side." "While M. de 

 Custine was travelling in Russia, he tells us that, at the fair of 

 Nijni-Novgorod, he was frightened by the multitude of Uattes which 

 thronged his chamber, with an infectious smell, and which could not 

 be got rid of. Dr. Tschudi, a careful traveller, who has explored 

 Switzerland in its smallest details, assures us that at the breath of 

 the south wind, which melts the snow in twelve hours, innumerable 

 hosts of cockchafers ravage the country. They are not a less terrible 

 scourge than the locusts to the south. 



During our Italian tour, my wife and I made an observation 

 which will not have escaped the notice of naturalists ; namely, that 

 the cockchafer does not die in autumn. From the inhabited portions 

 of our palazzo, almost entirely shut up in winter, we saw clouds of 

 these insects emerge in the spring, which had slept peacefully in ex- 

 pectation of its warmth. Moreover, in that country, even ephemeral 

 insects do not perish. Gigantic gnats wage war against us every 

 night, demanding our blood with sharp and strident voice. 



If, by the side of these proofs of the multiplication of insects, even 



