360 
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 
the impulse of their desires, tlieir fears, or their passions ! How touching an 
idea ! How well adapted to influence a woman !—But is this a fact 1 
Many long denied it, but doubt has been impossible since the truth was 
demonstrated in 1824 in M. Strauss’s treatise on “ The Cockchafer.” 
Madame de Merian, then, started from the silkworm. But her curiosity and 
artistic eagerness embraced everything. Contrasted with her dull and sombre 
Germany, Holland, with its rich American and Oriental collections, appeared to 
her like the great museum of the tropics. There she established herself, and with 
her pencil made its collections her own. Those faery cemeteries, glittering with 
the beauty of the dead, did but whet in her the desire to investigate life in 
the region where it most luxuriates. At the age of fifty-four she set out for 
Guiana; and, during a two years’ residence in its dangerous climate; collected 
the drawings and paintings which were to inaugurate art in natural bistory. 
In this branch of labour, the stumbling-block of the artist, who is an artist 
and nothing more, is that he may do very well, but make Nature coquettish, 
add the pretty to the beautiful, and flourish those graces and daintinesses which 
secure for a scientific treatise the favour of fashionable ladies. Nothing of this 
kind is discernible in the work of Sybille de Merian, but on every page a noble 
vigour, a masculine gravity, a courageous simplicity. At the same time, a close 
inspection, especially of the illustrations coloured by her own hand, discovers 
in the softness, breadth, and fulness of the plants, their lustrous and velvety 
freshness,—the tones either dead or enamelled, and, as it were, flowered, which 
the insects offer,—the tender, conscientious hand of a woman who has laboured 
upon the whole with a reverence inspired by love. 
We have seen (p. 180), in our chapter on the Fire-Flies , the astonishment 
of the timid German in a world so new, when the savages brought her its living 
materials,—venomous herbs, lizards, and snakes, and fantastic serpents. But 
the very strangeness of this nature, the emotions of the painter trembling 
before her models, the restless attention with which she sought to seize the 
changeful physiognomy and mysterious manners, while keenly agitating her 
heart, did but awaken her genius. Never satisfied by her representations 
of fugitive realities, she believed she could make each insect properly known 
only by painting it under all its forms (caterpillar, nymph, butterfly). And 
this not contenting her, she placed beneath it the vegetable on which it fed, and 
by its side the lizard, serpent, or spider which fed upon it. Thus, the mutu¬ 
ality and exchange of nature was clearly shown; you saw clearly that formid¬ 
able circulation, which, in tropical climates, is so rapid. Each of those fine 
plates, so harmonious and so complete, instructs not only by its truthful details, 
but inspires a profound sympathy with life, which is a very different and much 
more valuable teaching. 
One thing strikes me, which, however, this love explains. She has painted 
