THE STUDENT IN HIS SOLITUDE. 
147 
I was especially curious to look in their faces, but never succeeded. 
All that I could distinguish was confused, dull, melancholy. This dis¬ 
couraged me. I left off making collections.” 
I was but a child in this new study ; that is, I was fresh to it, and 
curious. My special anxiety was to interrogate the countenance of 
the dumb little world, and to surprise there, in default of voice, the 
silent thought. Thought ? At least, the dream, the obscure and float¬ 
ing instinct. 
I addressed myself to the ant; an humble being in form and colour, 
but endowed with a prodigious amount of social instinct and of the 
educational capacity; not to speak of its quickness of resource, of the 
promptitude with which it confronts perils, and chances, and embarrass¬ 
ments. 
I take then an ant of the commonest species—a neutral ant—one 
of the workers who are relieved from the wants of love, and in whom 
therefore the sex, diminished to a minimum for the advantage of 
labour, develops so much more powerfully its extraordinary instinct; 
who alone perform all the diverse trades of the little community, and 
are purveyors, nurses, architects, and inventors. 
I selected a very fine, serene, and luminous day—not luminous with 
the glare of summer, but the calm radiance of autumn (1st September 
1856). I was alone, in a state of perfect silence and repose, and in that 
complete forgetfulness of the world which is so rarely obtained. After 
the manifold agitations of the past and present, my heart for a moment 
was at peace. 
Never was I more ready to hear the mute voices which do not 
address themselves to the ear, to penetrate in a calm and benevolent 
spirit the mystery of the little world which on every side surrounds 
us, and yet has hitherto remained out of our reach and apart from our 
communicati ons. 
Alone with my ant, armed with a tolerably good lens, with a mag¬ 
nifying power of twelve, I placed it delicately on a large sheet of fine 
white paper which covered nearly the whole table. 
With the microscope I could have seen but a part and not the 
whole. A very considerable enlargement would also have exaggerated 
