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THE ENEMY OF NATURE. 
3rd. He speaks by his arts, which might fecundate our human in¬ 
ventions. 
This is the subject of our second book. 
Let us first attack the point where he wounds us most, and seems 
the auxiliary of death: his immense, ardent, and indefatigable work of 
destruction. Let us contemplate him in history, and begin at the re¬ 
motest epoch. 
In answer to our littlenesses, our disgusts, our terrors, to the narrow 
and egotistical judgments which we bring to bear upon such subjects, 
we must recall the great and necessary reactions of Nature. 
It has not advanced with the order of a continuous flood, but with 
refluxes and recoils back upon itself, which have enabled it to compass 
a perfect harmony. Our short-sighted survey, frequently arrested by 
these apparently retrograde movements, grows alarmed, takes fright, 
and misconceives the character of the whole. 
It is peculiar to the Infinite Love, which is continuously creating, 
to raise every created thing to the Infinite. But in this very infinity, 
it stimulates a creation of antagonisms which shall reduce the extent of 
the preceding. If we see it produce monstrous destroyers, be sure that 
they are destined, as a remedy and a repression, to check some monsters 
of fecundity. 
The herbivorous insects have had the task of keeping under the 
alarming vegetable accumulations of the primeval world. 
But these herbivora exceeding all law and all reason, the insect¬ 
ivorous insects were created to confine them within limits. 
The latter, robust and terrible, the tyrants of creation by their 
weapons and their wings, would have been the conquerors of the con¬ 
querors, and have driven to extremities the feebler species, if, above all 
the insect world and its weak powers of flight, had not risen on 
mighty wing a superior tyrant—the Bird. The haughty libellula was 
carried off by the swallow. 
By these successive agencies of destruction, however, production has 
not been suppressed, but restrained, and the species balanced in such 
wise that all endure and live. The more a species is pruned, the more 
