158 
THE BIRD AND THE INSECT. 
worms, when, one morning, they are hatched with that vast hunger no 
abundance of leaves can satisfy. Their proprietor has supposed himself 
in a position to content them with a rich and beautiful plantation of 
mulberry-trees; but it counts for nothing. You supply them with 
forests, and they still ask for more. At a distance of twenty or thirty 
yards you hear a strange uninterrupted buzzing; a murmur like that 
of brooks incessantly flowing, and incessantly grinding and wearing 
out the pebbles. Nor are you mistaken: it is a brook, a torrent, a 
boundless river of living matter, which, under the grand mechanism 
of so many minute instruments, sounds, and resounds, and murmurs, 
passing from the vegetable life to that of insects, and softly but in¬ 
vincibly bases itself on animality. 
To return to the primeval age. The most terrible destroyers, the 
most implacable assailants, which penetrated the lowermost rottenness 
of the great chaos, which at a higher level delivered the tree from the 
pressure of its parasites, and finally mounted to its branches, and 
brightened up the livid shadows,—these were the benefactors of species 
yet to come. Their uninterrupted work of unconquerable destruction 
reduced within reasonable limits the excess in which Nature was almost 
lost. They opened up splendid, free, and unencumbered spaces; and 
the monsters, banished from the gulf where they swarmed, grew more 
and more barren, and by that great revelation of the forest were exposed 
to the child of Light,—the Bird. 
A profound agreement and genial fellowship were established be¬ 
tween the latter and his protagonist, the child of Night, the Insect, 
which had throAvn open the abyss, and delivered into his power the 
enemy. Consider, moreover, that in proportion as an exuberant nourish¬ 
ment fortified and exalted the insect, when its blood was intoxicated 
by so many burning plants, a ferocity previously unknown prevailed, 
and the fiercer and bolder species no longer limited themselves to 
undermining the retreats of the monsters, but attacked the monsters 
also. Stings, augers, cupping-glasses, trenchant teeth, sharpened pincers, 
an arsenal of unknown and as yet unnamed arms, came into existence, 
were elongated and whetted for assault upon the living matter. They 
were needed. They proved to be the lancet which cut the putrescent 
