194 
THE INSECT AS A WARRIOR. 
silk might be used as clothing for the poor. All classes thenceforth 
might wear a material warm, light, impervious, solid; and not only 
so, but beautiful, brilliant, and noble. Such a change would be 
equivalent, in my eyes, to the general ennoblement and transfigura¬ 
tion of the people. 
Reaumur long ago asserted that numerous chrysalides would furnish 
a beautiful silk. The spider would yield a substance both delicate and 
tenacious,—as witness the admirable veil of spider’s silk preserved in 
the Paris Museum. 
The delicate Arachne, whose light thread resembles a fleecy cloud,— 
which is nevertheless so strong, as it issues from the spinnerets,— 
Arachne is pre-eminently the spinner. But, as a general rule, the insect 
is the weaver, and wholly devoted to that feminine art. I was about 
to say, the insect is a woman. 
In our vocabulary “ feminine ” means feeble; but in the Insect World 
it is the synonym of strength and energy. It is,—as is the case with 
maternity everywhere,—it is for the purpose of defending and nourish¬ 
ing the child, of provisioning the cradle in which the orphan will remain 
alone,—it is for this purpose specially that the insect is a warrior, and 
furnished with formidable weapons. 
As far as concerns the instruments which pierce, and cut, and saw, 
the insect, in spite of all our progress, is perhaps a little in advance of 
man to-day. The instinct of maternity, the need of providing for its 
child—the future orphan—the protecting shelter of the hardest bodies, 
has evidently inspired it to make extraordinary efforts for the develop¬ 
ment and refinement of its tools. A few, in their fantastical character, 
have as yet no analogues in any of our factories. 
Long before Reaumur organized the thermometer, the ants, for the 
protection of their delicate, hygrometrical, and susceptible eggs, divided 
their habitations into a series of thirty or forty stories,—lowering or 
raising the tiny creatures to the degree of warmth, dryness, or humidity, 
which the temperature of the day and of the hour of the day rendered 
necessary. Thus they formed an infallible thermometer, on which one 
might rely with as much certainty as on that of the philosophers. 
In the comparisons between human and insect industry, the differ- 
