344 
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 
lias not those touching signs of close relationship which render the higher 
animals so interesting to us. It has no blood; it has no milk. But I recog¬ 
nize it as akin by one loftier attribute : it has the social sense. 
An ignorant dogmatism had long asserted that the very perfection of these 
insect-societies depended on their automatism. But modern observation has 
proved, that if the conditions are varied, and unforeseen obstacles and diffi¬ 
culties placed in their way, they confront them with vigour and calm sense, 
and with the resources of an unfettered ingenuity. 
It is a world of method , which, at need, can show itself unrestrained. 
A world which, presently, in its original mission of combat and destruction, 
seemed to us an atrociously fatal force ; but which afterwards, by the influence 
of its maternal devotion, became a world of social harmony, preaching a lofty 
morality. 
But is maternity all % No; the community of life introduces the insect to 
the threshold of a still higher rank of sentiments. Even among those which 
are isolated—among the necrophori, for example, and the pilulary scarabsei— 
fraternal co-operation has a beginning. They render mutual services, and fly 
to the assistance of one another, co-operating in certain works. Among the 
sociable insects the feeling is carried to a considerable height; the bees feed 
one another, mouth to mouth, and stint themselves to supply their sisters. A 
very safe, and by no means romantic observer, saw an ant dressing the wound 
of another ant which had lost an antenna, by pouring on it some honey-dew to 
close it up and protect it from the air. 
See now how far we have advanced from our starting-point, where the 
insect appeared to us a pure voracious element, a machine of absorption. 
A great, a sublime metamorphosis, more marvellous than that of the 
moultings and transformations which guided the egg, the grub, the nymph, to 
the assumption of wings. 
It is a world strange to man, but singularly parallel to our own, though 
having no mutual mode of communication. We invent scarcely anything 
which has not previously—-though for a long time unknown to us—been in- 
1 
vented by the insect. 
What have the great animals discovered! Nothing. Apparently their 
warmth of life, and their red blood, obscure their mental light. 
On the contrary, the insect world, free from a heavy apparatus of flesh and 
blood intoxication, more subtly sensitive, and moved by a nervous electricity, 
seems a frightful world of spirits. 
Frightful! No. If terror sit at the threshold of science, safety is found 
in its penetralia. At the first glance the living energy of the invisible may 
startle us ; and with a shudder of alarm we may contemplate in the animalcule 
