342 
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 
obstacle to life. A terrible war, an infernal toil, which ensures the safety of 
the world. 
This powerful accelerator of the universal passage should destroy like fire. 
But to secure the sharpness of action such a mission requires, it is necessary 
that its own transformations be accelerated, its life compressed ; that from love 
to death, and death to love, it revolve in a burning circle. However brief may 
be this circle, it cannot be accomplished but at the cost of painful metamor¬ 
phoses, which resemble a series of successive deaths. 
Among most insects, marriage means the death of the father; maternity, 
the death of the mother. Thus the generations pass away without knowing 
one another. The mother loves her daughter, anticipates her birth, often 
immolates herself for her sake, but will never see her. 
This cruel contradiction, this harsh denial which Nature opposes to the 
most pathetic aspirations of love, apparently inflames and irritates it. It gives 
everything unreservedly, knowing that it is for death. It draws from it two 
powers; on the one hand, unheard tongues of light and colour , ravishing phan¬ 
tasmagorias, in which love is not translated, but expands in rays, and pharos- 
fires, and torches, and burning sparks. It is the appeal to the rapid present, the 
lightning and the thunder of happiness. But the love of the to come, the fore¬ 
seeing tenderness for that which not yet is, is expressed in another fashion by 
the astonishingly complex and ingenious creation of a storehouse of imple¬ 
ments, whence all our mechanical arts have derived their most perfect models. 
Usually this grand apparatus of tools serves but for a day; it enables them at 
the moment they forsake the orphan to improvise the cradle which shall con¬ 
tinue the mother, shall perpetuate the incubation when the mother ceases to 
exist. 
But how 1 Must she indeed perish 1 Can there be no exception to the 
pitiless law ] In hot climates, especially, many mothers may survive. What 
if these mothers united together to deceive destiny, by associating so many brief 
existences in one common and lasting life in which their children should find 
an eternal mother ? 
How shall we elude death ?—Let us create society. 
The society of mothers. The insect is essentially a female and a mother. 
The male is an exception, a secondary accident,—frequently, too, an abortion, 
a caricature of an insect. 
The dream of the female—maternity, and the safety of her child—the 
preservation of the future—leads her to create the community, which secures 
her own safety. 
This society can only perpetuate itself by ensuring its existence against the 
season of sterility. Hence results a need of accumulation. Hence proceed 
labour and economy. 
