CHAPTER VII.

INSTRUMENTS OF THE INSECT: AND ITS CHEMICAL ENERGIES, AS IN THE COCHINEAL AND THE CANTHARIDES.

Have I insisted too much upon my theme? No; I have reached its very depths, its most important details.

Silk is not a particular, but a general view or aspect of it, for nearly every insect produces silk.

Hitherto we have dealt with only one kind of silk,--that of the bombyx, and indeed that of a species of bombyx which is not very fertile. Let us hope that the meritorious Society of Acclimatization will introduce here the Chinese bombyx (_Attacus_), which lives on the dwarf oak, whose strong and cheap silk might be used as clothing for the poor. All classes thenceforth might wear a material warm, light, impervious, solid; and not only so, but beautiful, brilliant, and noble. Such a change would be equivalent, in my eyes, to the general ennoblement and transfiguration of the people.

Réaumur long ago asserted that numerous chrysalides would furnish a beautiful silk. The spider would yield a substance both delicate and tenacious,--as witness the admirable veil of spider's silk preserved in the Paris Museum.

The delicate Arachne, whose light thread resembles a fleecy cloud,--which is nevertheless so strong, as it issues from the spinnerets,--Arachne is pre-eminently the spinner. But, as a general rule, the insect is the weaver, and wholly devoted to that feminine art. I was about to say, the insect is a woman.

In our vocabulary "feminine" means feeble; but in the Insect World it is the synonym of strength and energy. It is,--as is the case with maternity everywhere,--it is for the purpose of defending and nourishing the child, of provisioning the cradle in which the orphan will remain alone,--it is for this purpose specially that the insect is a warrior, and furnished with formidable weapons.

As far as concerns the instruments which pierce, and cut, and saw, the insect, in spite of all our progress, is perhaps a little in advance of man to-day. The instinct of maternity, the need of providing for its child--the future orphan--the protecting shelter of the hardest bodies, has evidently inspired it to make extraordinary efforts for the development and refinement of its tools. A few, in their fantastical character, have as yet no analogues in any of our factories.

Long before Réaumur organized the thermometer, the ants, for the protection of their delicate, hygrometrical, and susceptible eggs, divided their habitations into a series of thirty or forty stories,--lowering or raising the tiny creatures to the degree of warmth, dryness, or humidity, which the temperature of the day and of the hour of the day rendered necessary. Thus they formed an infallible thermometer, on which one might rely with as much certainty as on that of the philosophers.

In the comparisons between human and insect industry, the differences which we remark belong not so much to the methods as to the speciality of their wants and situation. The insect aptly varies the application of its arts. For example: the spider which, in its network-trap, improvised every day, lightens its work by a mixture of gluing and spinning, follows quite a different process in the important labour of fabricating the soft, warm, and durable cocoons which are intended to receive its young. The nest would seem to be partly spun and partly felted, like the majority of birds' nests.

We know that from the water-spider man derived the idea of the diving-bell; but it is _not_ generally known that an ingenious Norman peasant has succeeded in imitating perfectly the operations of the larva of the syrphes, which, by means of an extremely prolonged respiratory apparatus, preserves a communication with the pure and wholesome air, even while working at the bottom of the most putrid waters.

It seems, then, that in the Insect World exist a complete pharmacy, chemistry, and perfumery. Have our sciences been sufficiently attentive to this fact? The potent vitality which gives an extraordinary force to the muscles of such tiny creatures, seems also to endow their liquids with active properties and burning energies which the large animals do not possess. Many, for defensive purposes, are gifted with caustic secretions--which they eject the moment you approach--or with fulminating powders. Others with poison, which flows as soon as the sting has been thrust in. Some possess, in addition, an art of magnetizing or etherizing their enemy; and others, like certain ants which work in damp, woody places, season their abodes by burning them, as it were, with potent formic acid.

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The entire genus of the _Cerambyx_ (or Long-horned Beetle) exhale a strong, rose-like odour, which is smelt at a distance, is lasting, and endures after the creature's death. Even among the Carnivora, ay, and among the Coprophagi, we meet with perfumed insects, or, at all events, with insects which, when in danger of being captured, endeavour to deceive you, or implore pity, by emitting agreeable odours.

Others shine with admirable colours. The deep reds of the Nopal Coccus have furnished the purple of kings.

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 concentrate 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 innumerable 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 multitude of objects.

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 dangerous 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_, provides you, if you first remove its head, which is a deadly poison, with an exquisite cream, the sweet and soporific influence of which, say the Brazilian Indians, lulls love asleep. For two days and nights, the young maiden who has tasted of it, crouching under the blossomy tree, feels all the more powerfully in her soul the depth of the virgin forests, and the mystery of those fresh glades which have never seen the sun, nor echoed to the step of man, nor known any intruder but the lonely great blue butterfly. And yet she is not alone: love quenches her thirst with the most delicious fruits.