WEAPONS AND TOOLS. 
61 
“ I had never before been brought in contact with a world like this. 
My father’s vigilance, and still more successfully, the assistance of the 
little birds, had preserved us from it. So, in my experience, and with 
a heart overcome by the spectacle of so much ruin, I cursed those 
whom one ought not to curse, because all creatures are from God. 
“ Later in life, but much later, I understood the designs of Provi¬ 
dence. When man is absent the insect ought to take his place, so that 
everything may pass through the great crucible, to be renewed or 
purified.” 
Such is the fear, such the instinctive repugnance of the child. But 
we are all children, and even Philosophy, despite its longing after 
universal sympathy, cannot guard against similar impressions. The 
apparatus of fantastic weapons with which the insect is usually armed 
seems to it a menace against man. 
Living in a world of strife, it is imperative that the insect should 
be born in mail of proof, and the insects of the Tropics are frequently 
terrible to the eye. 
Yet a considerable number of these terrifying weapons, pincers, 
hooks, saws, pikes, augers, screws, rollers, and dentilated teeth,—the 
formidable arsenal which gives them the appearance of veterans setting 
out for the battle-field,—prove, if we examine them rightly, to be the 
pacific tools with which they gain their livelihood, the implements with 
which they do their regular work. Here the artisan carries his work¬ 
shop with him. He is at once the workman and the manufacturer. 
What should we say of our human operatives, if they marched ever 
bristling with the steel and old iron they make use of in their labours ? 
They would appear to us very strange and monstrous, and would even 
fill our minds with fear. 
The insect, as we shall hereafter see, is a warrior through circum¬ 
stances, through the necessities of self-defence or appetite, but generally 
he is before all and above all industrial. There is not a single species 
which may not be classified according to its work, and ranged under 
the banner of a guild of trades. 
The great achievement of the artist, or, to use the language of our 
