196 
INSECTS AND THEIR WEAPONS. 
By a skilful mixture, we also obtain from the cochineal the pre¬ 
eminently gay and radiant colour, carmine, with its innumerable tints 
and rosy shades. 
A sovereign art with the insect is to carry on its sting, and concen¬ 
trate at a particular point, the liquids which flow in the plant, in the 
living being. It is the very art of irritation. Its applications are in¬ 
numerable in medicine and industry; tints, paintings, varied ornaments, 
a hundred fantastic and beautiful things come to us from the sting 
of the galls, the excrescences and gibbosities which they so skilfully 
raise. 
The cochineal insect, while engaged in extracting by this process 
from exotic vegetables the envelope of solid green in which it will 
spend its prolonged period of rest, furnishes us with the red of reds, 
the scarlet of lake, which will colour varnishes, and wax, and a multi¬ 
tude of objects. 
s 
In health or illness, the stings of insects upon the living flesh are 
violent irritants for disturbing or re-establishing the course of life. In 
these there is nothing mediocre. A few, without sting, burn you by 
their internal acridity. 
Who has not seen on the dusty plain, before the thirsty harvest, the 
cantharides, with its emerald enamel, abruptly crossing the footpath 
with a wild and agitated movement! Burning elixir of existence, 
where love transforms itself into a poison,—it is not with impunity 
that we make use of it medicinally. That medieval pharmacy, which 
was so dangerous to man, is not without peril, it seems, for the animals 
themselves. A very intelligent but eccentrically ardent cat, which I 
kept for a long time, among its other caprices of violence loved to hunt 
the cantharides. It seemed attracted by the acridity of the beautiful 
insect, as the moth is by the flame. It was an intoxication. But when, 
hunting it through the flowers, she had seized and crushed her danger¬ 
ous victim, the latter appeared to take its revenge. 
The inflammable feline nature, stimulated by the fiery sting, broke 
out in cries, in excesses of fury, in strange leaps and bounds. She 
expiated her orgie of fire by terrible sufferings. 
But, on the contrary, another insect, the bamboo-worm, or malalis, 
