ASSOCIATION AMONG INSECTS. 
343 
But Nature, eluded by the effort and the toil,—I was going to say, tli6 
virtue,—does not lose its rights. Beaten on the one side, on the other it re¬ 
acts upon the commonwealth, and grievously oppresses it. This self-protecting 
society, while rescuing immense multitudes from death and prolonging the 
common existence, multiplies the mouths to be fed, and is often overloaded. 
If its members would not die of famine, they must live on a very scanty 
regimen, must preserve alive a limited number of fertile females, and condemn 
the majority, or nearly the whole of the females to celibacy. Beared for 
virginity and labour, sterilized from the cradle in their maternal powers, they 
are by no means of barren intellect. The extinction of certain faculties seems 
to strengthen the others. 
Such is the institution, ingeniously severe, of aunts or adoptive mothers. 
With too little sexual feeling to desire love, they possess enough to wish for 
children, to love and adopt them. They are both less than mothers, and more 
than mothers. Should invasion or ruin befall the hive or the ant-hill, the true 
mothers consult their own safety in flight; the devoted aunts or sisters know 
no other thought but that of saving the children. 
Elevated by this factitious maternity and disinterested love above itself, the 
insect surpasses all other creatures,—even those which, like the mammals, are 
a 
evidently superior in organization. It teaches us that organism is not every¬ 
thing, and that there is a potency in life which acts strongly beyond the range 
and in despite of the organs. Those species which, like the ants, have no 
special instruments to facilitate their work, are invariably the most advanced. 
The noblest work of the world, the most elevated goal to which its inhabi¬ 
tants tend, is the community,—by which I mean a society strongly consoli¬ 
dated. The only being, besides Man, who seems to reach this goal, is un¬ 
doubtedly the Insect. 
No other creature approaches it. The most sublime and charming, the 
Bird, is, through these very qualities, also the most individual. Its society 
is the family; its community, the nest; its associations are only collocations of 
nests for the sake of security. Those mammals which approach us so nearly, 
and impress us so strongly by their advanced organisation,—I mean, the 
beaver,—show wonderful powers of combination for the execution of their task ; 
but, when the work is done, they retire to their own houses and families, 
isolated by the very tenderness of their domestic affections. The assembly of 
the beavers is, as it were, a colony of builders and engineers, where each one 
lives apart; but they are not citizens, and it is not a city. 
The city is only to be found in the insect world. Separated from man by 
many degrees in organism, the insect approaches him more closely than any 
other being in the supreme work of his life,—which is, to live for the many. It 
