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Beings eminently electrical, birds are éclaircissements, we find we have not left in closer relation than any other creatures out any suggestion or speculation of interwith numerous phenomena of meteor- est or importance. Good-will towards ology, heat and magnetism, that are inap- all living creatures, and a more correct preciable to our senses. That they have sense of the relations in which birds stand a kind of physical forewarning for such is to man; the domestication of such species a fact known to all antiquity, and familiar as are fitted for it, and forbearance towards to every observer of nature. Had Napo- all, as only fulfilling each its own part in leon taken notice of the premature migra- the great scheme of creation-such are tion southward of the birds of the north the great lessons taught us by these phiin 1811, he would have saved an army. losophic views of the nature of being.

It has been said that these migrations. take place in their season without any choice of day at indeterminate epochs. Michelet combats this view of the case. Being at Nantes in October, 1851, he saw the swallows gather together one fine morning on the roof of the Church of St. Felix. Their discussions were loud, anxious, and prolonged, but at length they took flight. They had not traveled some three hundred leagues (four or five hours' flight) when it came on to rain, as if threatening a deluge. Not an insect but was struck down to the ground, and had the swallows remained one day longer it would have been too late.

A chapter on the swallow, free in virtue of its admirable powers of flight, free by its facility of obtaining food, and free in its choice of climate, never singing but in praise of life, and blessing the Creator, appropriately closes the subject of migration. Another on the harmonies of the temperate zone, repeating some points previously noticed; and another on birds as workmen and architects for themselves and for man, lead the way to the final discourses on song, crowned by nightingale."

"the

This little songster of our woods is, in Michelet's estimation, the only artist among birds. It alone is a creator; it alone varies, enriches, amplifies its song, and adds to it new songs. It alone is fecund and capable of variation within itself; others are so only by education and by imitation. It alone resumes all that others can do, and accomplishes all that others can do; other birds, even the most brilliant, can only give one melody of the nightingale's. Only one other bird can produce sublime effects by simple means, and that is the lark, "daughter of

the sun."

We have said enough to give an idea of the spirit which guides and pervades this new philosophy of ornithology. Looking over the concluding summary and

It is time to turn, then, to see how far the same principles are applicable to insect life. Birds, Michelet says, he had understood and loved. "We exchanged languages. I spoke for them, they sang for me." But it is different when, fallen from the skies, he finds himself in presence of the mysterious and dumb offspring of night. What language is he to use, what signs of intelligence must he invent, and how shall he contrive to establish relations of intimacy with insect life?

An insect is an enigma. What is not understood, is distrusted. It is therefore killed to save the trouble of inquiry. Besides, an insect is so small, that one is not expected to act upon principles of justice towards it.

"Yet to the systems of philosophers and to the fears of children (which are perhaps the same

thing) this would be about its answer:

"It would insist, in the first place, that justice is universal-that size makes no difference in respect to right-and that if it could be sup posed that right is not equal, and that universal love could move the balance, it would be in favor of the little ones.

"It would say that it is absurd to judge by appearances, to condemn organs the uses of which are unknown, and which are, for the most part, tools of special professions, or the instruments of a thousand trades; that it (the insect) is the great destroyer and fabricator, preeminently an industrious creature, and one of the most active workmen endowed with life.

"It would say, (and its assurance would seem to participate of pride,) that to judge by visible tures that which loves the most. Love gives signs, works, and results, it is among all creato it wings, a marvelous display of colors, and even visible flames. Love is to it a proximate or instantaneous death, with an astonishing maternal foresight, which enables it to continue its ingenious protection to its orphan. Lastly, this maternal genius goes so far as to surpass and even eclipse the rare instances of associaduce the insect to create republics and cities!" tion among birds and quadrupeds, and to in

In the long studies which paved the way to the production of his work on

birds, "insects," Michelet says, "appeared" in this limited space, in this apparent to him, as seen by the side of the former, disorder of stones, trees, and rocks, there sometimes in harmony, at others in an- lay a form sufficiently regular to hide tagonism, but still oftener in profile, as a within itself a mystery which nothing besubordinate creation." As with birds, trayed at first sight." The well-known however, Michelet would have us to un- sandstone of Fontainebleau is very perderstand that his experiences were real. vious to moisture. The rain-waters perHe had published "L'Oiseau," and desi- colate through it, and flow into a common rous of repose, he sought for it in a way- central reservoir, leaving the surface dry, side inn-once a convent-at about half a yet nourishing the roots of the trees. league from Lucerne. The Alps, which This is the genius of the place. "Yet the he had designated in his works as "the word 'genius' is too definite. The word common altar of Europe," were still the 'fairy' is too lax." A great Italian artist same to him. He could salute without gives it expression in the saloon of Henri horror the great shadows that fell from II. It is the Nemorosa, her hands full of the mountains, and contemplate with re- wild flowers, secreted behind a rude rock, ligious ecstasy the great harmonies which, yet herself sympathizing and dreamy, her vague elsewhere, are there palpable to eyes full of tears. the eye. Close by was a pine forest elevated above the lake, behind the rock called Seeburgh. This was his favorite haunt, and in its recesses he was in the company of tomtits and wasps, of scolyti, eating up the hearts of the old pines, and themselves again attacked by the woodpecker. In one of these trees, hollowed out by these tiny insects, and then, when exhausted, abandoned by them, he found what he calls "a real palace, or rather a vast and superb city." This, the work possibly of generations of ants, he compares to Thebes and to Babylon. His wife, the companion of his travels and his studies, had removed with a stick the green and moist mosses which constituted the outer ramparts to this insect acropolis; and accustomed as he was to the falls of republics and of empires, still this accident suggested a train of painful thought. "What can I do," he exclaimed, inwardly, "for this world destroyed, for this city ruined? What can I do for this great insect population, so laborious and so meritorious, and which yet all living things despise, persecute, or devour; which itself only exhibits bright evidences of disinterested love and public devotion -the social sense in its most brilliant energy? One thing: understand it, explain it, and, if I can, bring to it the light of a kindly interpretation."

The real inhabitants of this forest are the ants. They constitute an infinitely numerous population. The quarriers and the ants now alone give life to the scene. Formerly there were bees, but the introduction of pines and fir-trees, that allow nothing to grow under them, have killed the flowers and the heather. The ants labored in the sands, the quarrymen worked at the sandstone. Michelet admired the similarity of their destiny, their laborious patience, their admirable perseverance. "Men-ants above, ants almost men below." Free possessors of the sky, birds hovered over men, but grovelling ants imitated the laborious destiny of humanity. "I, too," says Michelet, "have resembled much more a bee, or an ant, than a bird, in the indefatigable labor that has kept me to my work."

The world of insects may be that of darkness and of mystery; yet is it, nevertheless, that in which we find the most striking light thrown upon the two treasures so dear to the soul-love and immortality. This is so particularly manifested in the metamorphoses of certain species, that it has been a favorite image from all antiquity with poets, with philosophers, and with pious men alike.

"The artist Gros saw one day one of his pupils come into his study, a handsome, thoughtless

youth, who had deemed it a clever thing to pin It was at Fontainebleau, however, that a suberb butterfly to his hat, where it still he brought his experiences to maturity. flapped in agony. The painter was indignant, That strange, gloomy, fantastic, and alter- and his passion so roused, that he exclaimed: nately sandy and rocky forest, was just have for great things? You find a beautiful "What, wretch! is that the feeling that you the place for such studies. The true fairy creature, and you know of nothing better than is nature. Convinced that there is har- to crucify it, and to kill it barbarously! Go mony in every thing, even in "dead na-out of this, and never come back again! never ture," he says that he understood that appear again in my presence!'

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This anger will not surprise those who know how lively were the sensibilities of the great artist, how deep his worship of the beautiful. It is more surprising to hear the anatomist Lyonnet comforting himself, at the conclusion of his dissertation on the structure of the caterpillar, that to acquire all that information he had only had to destroy three individuals. Insects are repulsive, cause anxiety, and even create fear in proportion to our ignorance. Almost all, especially in our climates, are totally inoffensive. But we always suspect the unknown, and we almost always kill them as the shortest way of solving the riddle. We say of insects, Little things, insignificant, unworthy of notice. Yet this insignificance is infinity. They constitute a world enormously powerful, which is despised in detail, and yet which at times terrifies us when it appears before our eyes in some of its unforeseen revelations. Look at the mighty ocean, illuminated at night by myriads of imperceptible animalcula ? Who can contemplate such a scene, and not be filled with wonder and admiration at the fecundity of nature! Look at the molluscs, who are neither more nor less than the constructors of the globe we inhabit. They have prepared with their remains the soil that is under our feet. They have passed by decomposition into the state of chalk or limestone; they do not the less constitute the basis of a large portion of the earth's crust.

Strange to say, it is the smallest creatures that have effected the greatest results. The rhizopode, invisible to the naked eye, has raised a monument to itself greater than the Pyramids-nothing less than Central Italy and a large proportion of the Apennines. A great portion of the vast cordillera of the Andes has no other origin than the relics of molluscs tilted up and changed by volcanic action. It was not the great animals, the rhinoceroses or the mastodons, which contributed by their bones to make up the soil. It was the smallest living creatures. The siliceous tripoli, Ehrenberg has shown, is made up of animalcules so small that it would require one hundred and eightyseven millions of them to weigh one grain! In our own times we see the calcareous polypi, corals, and madrepores creating islands, nay, whole archipelagoes, and we also find further that numerous other animals of the fish and mollouscous tribes

feed upon these lithophytes whilst still in a soft condition, when they have not secreted so much stony substance as to constitute an adequate protection, and, digesting them, void them in the shape of chalk. English navigators have recently discovered at the bottom of the sea this great animo-chemical factory of chalk going on, and in which the living is constantly passing to the inorganic state. Not only this, but in other places where the coral and madrepore rocks of former times have been disrupted and broken up by changes that have since taken place, nature sends another laborer who throws out a stony envelope to its soft body, which it goes on ever prolonging, uniting stone to stone, coral to madrepore, throwing bridges across chasms, and welding reef to reefa labor such as man, in all his pride, could never dream of undertaking, and by which the island of Sicily, without some unanticipated geological change, will one day be surrounded by a continuous rocky reef.

Michelet treats of insects under the three aspects of their metamorphoses, their mission and their arts, and their social condition. The first embraces what he is pleased to designate as "love and death," something more than instinctthe orphan, the mummy nymph or chrysalis, and the phoenix or perfect insect. The second embraces the insect as an agent of nature in the acceleration of death and of life, insects that are auxiliaries to man, the phantasmagory of colors and of light, the silkworm, the instruments of insects and their chemical energies, the renovation of art from the study of insects, and the spider. The third aspect opens to us "the city of darkness-the termites," ants, wasps, and bees.

Our philosopher's efforts to place himself in social relation with insects were not so successful as with birds, whose language excessive sympathy almost led him to believe he could understand. But insects had no language; they breathed by their sides; they had no communication with the outer world but by their electric antennæ. He could not even detect that they had a physiognomy, an expression.

"This fixed mask, (he says,) motionless, condemned to silence, is it that of a monster or of and its many acts marked by reflection, its arts a specter? No. On contemplating its motions more advanced than those of great animals, one is more than tempted to believe that there is some one in that head. And, from the top to

the lowest in the scale of life, one perceives the identity of mind."

Some insects are edible: a learned entomologist tells us that caterpillars have a taste of almonds, and spiders of nuts. The Roman ladies used to eat the cossi, as the Eastern ladies still do the blaps, and the Portuguese of Brazil ants, "at the moment when their wings raise them in the air like an aspiration of love."

But to be enabled truly to appreciate insect life we must study their labors in the social state. The bee and the ant exhibit life in its highest state of harmony. Both are highly endowed, intelligent, educated alike as artists and architects. The ant is more especially remarkable as an educator, the bee as a geometrician. The ant is republican; the bee, on the contrary, finds a moral support in a queen. It is, then, with insects as with man, Providence permits a diversity of polit

If insects speak to us neither by the voice nor by their physiognomy, by what do they appeal to us? By their energies. By the prodigious destruction which they effect in the over-productiveness of nature; by their colors, fires, and poisons, and by their arts. In all these manifestations, if properly understood, there is nothing but wisdom and beneficence. Even the persecution of domestic animals by flies constitutes, according to our philosopher, their safety. Without the stimulus given by these tiny persecutors, cattle would remain at times stupidly resigned, till, no longer capable of movement, they would perish on the spot. Flies drive them to running waters, or to more salubrious places. In Central Africa the nam reg-ical condition. "In a city of virgins," ulates the migrations of whole herds. The tsetse, it is to be supposed, is sent by some such similar provision of nature. Even the terrible ant, when it invades a house and expels the inhabitants, does so for wise purposes. They destroy every living thing; mice, toads, snakes, are all devoured--not an insect, nor even an insect's egg is left. The house is thoroughly cleansed, and then the visitors leave it to its master, going on to another. The spiders of the Antilles are such good servants, and so useful in the destruction of flies, that they are sold in the markets as birds are with us.

Among the other auxiliaries of man are the dragon-fly, that kills its thousands of insects in a day; the cicindelæ, which, with its two sabres for jaws, is immensely destructive of insect life; the carabi, a tribe of warriors armed to the teeth, real "gardes champêtres." It is cruel to destroy these useful little creatures; they should, on the contrary, be respected.

Of auxiliaries of another description, we have worms, which digest, cleanse, and renew the soil. In a similar manner the necrophori are ever busy in removing putridity. Gardeners are often exasperated at the presence of insects in tubercules, as of the dahlia, when they are really there only to remove the dead or diseased parts. Nothing would be more advantageous to all who are interested in gardens than to know how to distinguish useful from hurtful insects. People would not then be daily committing violence to the harmonies of nature.

Michelet tells us, "a queen bee is a common mother-the type of a religion of love. In both maternity constitutes the social principle, but fraternity also flourishes, and attains a ripe and active development."

If the organization of insects is so low as is generally supposed, they are only so much the more to be admired for being able to accomplish such great works with such inferior organs.

It is especially to be remarked that the most perfect works are executed by those very insects (in the instance of ants, for example) that are not endowed with especial organs to facilitate their execution, and which have, therefore, to supply their place by skill and invention.

"If these artists were not so small, in what high consideration would not their arts and their labors be held! If the cities of the termites were compared with the huts of negroes, and the subterranean labors of ants with the excavations of the Tourangeaux on the Loire, how significantly would the superior art of insects shine forth! Is it, then, size that influences the moral judgment of men? What is the size necessary to be attained to win your esteem ?"

These are the dreams of a democratic optimist, teeming with exquisite fancies and noble aspirations, but more fitted for another and a better world than for this. No wonder that the work on "Birds" has met with little acceptance in this utilitarian country, albeit the home of a Wilson, a Bewick, and a White. The work on

"Insects" has not been before introduced to the reading public: it is as yet almost unfledged. If we have done any thing towards making the intent and purport of

both more generally understood and better appreciated, we shall not regret the pains bestowed on what has been truly a labor of love.

From the Dublin University Magazine.

THE TIMES AND THE LONDON TIMES."

WHEN galvanic spasm is elevated by statesmen to the dignity of LIFE, and the despot replaces volition with the string of the puppet, we are apt to inquire into the sanity of the former, and the honesty of the latter. Numbers and Antiquity are the little household gods to which men bow down. Not the less are they the great gods of entire nations. There, they usurp the hallowed throne of Truth. If man be taught by advancing from the known to the unknown-if the organs of sensation form his stepping-stones to the edifice of knowledge-if he thus proceeds from the concrete to the abstract, and, by the aid of the former, at last rears the temple of science, that is no reason why he should obstinately confound the scaf folding with the solid masonry of the towering structure. Still less is the blindness of that individual to be eulogized, who can mistake the freedom of the oak for the rigidity of the column. We can not stunt the growth of men nor of states by the bare assertion that the one is a marble statue, the other a gorgeous building. Each must expand, or it dies. At this very moment, England is an evidence of the fact, in her commerce, her government, and above all, her Parliament. Wherever free men live, free institutes will arise. These, like the offspring of man, or that of the forest, grow without legislation. The law of growth lies in their very being-it is not impressed from without. The soil is free-the sap is strong. The plant, alike human and vegetable, upshoots not at the military word of command. It grows--it is not built. How strangely, then, do statesmen think of England's state! Her con

stitution is not, can never be, a pile of building. It is the forest oak ever growing the more mightily, ever spreading its branches the more widely, ever striking its roots the more deeply from the shades of distant ages forward, down through sun-lit glades to that expanse of verdure which now allows the breath of heaven to play around its branches, and exhibits beneath its majestic shelter the elastie step of the Freeman. In a word, it is the man that makes the state, and not the state the man. The might of Great Britain is but the aggregate moral power of each single individual. In England, then, policy has not arisen from politicians, nor institutions from institutes. No doctors of the Sorbonne have squared her constitution; no salaried legislature has struck out its decorous length, and breadth, and depth, and height; no communists have laid down on paper trim and elaborate schemes for its formation. It is just what it has grown to be, and it is nothing more. Let us not, however, forget that it will continue to grow. Before we can stop that, we must root up the tree itself.

Perhaps there is no stronger instance of this vitality in our constitution, energizing, leavening, and leading the masses, than the power of the Press. Here we behold the singular spectacle of a body of men gradually forcing their way into the Commons' House and there sitting as the censors of an ancient body of legislators. This is the new Parliament of Publicity, in contradistinction to the parliament of closed doors-the rising physician called in to feel the pulse of the aged practitioner. Our parliamentary proceed

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