The successive Junes, Julys, and Augusts spent in this low-lying, warm forest country have served to restore in my mind the insect world to its proper place in the scheme of things. In recent years, in this northern land, it had not seemed so important a place as at an earlier period of my life in a country nearer to the sun. Our insects, less numerous, smaller in size, more modest in colouring, and but rarely seen in swarms and clouds and devastating multitudes, do not force themselves on our attention, as is the case in many other regions of the earth. Here, for instance, where I am writing this chapter, there is a stretch of flat, green, common land by the Test, and on this clouded afternoon, at the end of summer, while sitting on one of the {111} innumerable little green hillocks covering the common, it seemed to me that I was in a vacant place where animal life had ceased to be. Not an insect hummed in that quiet, still atmosphere, not could I see one tiny form on the close-cropped turf at my feet. Yet I was sitting on one of their populous habitations. Cutting out a section of the cushion-like turf of grass and creeping thyme that covered the hill and made it fragrant, I found the loose, dry earth within teeming with minute yellow ants, and many of the hillocks around were occupied by thousands upon thousands of the same species. Indeed, I calculated that in a hundred square yards at that spot the ant inhabitants alone numbered not less than about two hundred thousand. [Sidenote: The unregarded tribes] It is partly on account of this smallness and secretiveness of most of our insects--of our seeing so little of insect life generally except during the summer heats in a few favourable localities--and partly an effect of our indoor life, that we think and care so little about them. The important part they play, if it is taught us, fades out of knowledge: we grow in time to regard them as one of the superfluities in which nature abounds despite the ancient saying to the contrary. Or worse, as nothing but pests. What good are they to us indeed! Very little. The silk-worm and the honey-bee have been in a measure domesticated, and rank with, though a long way after, our cattle, our animal pets and poultry. But wild insects! There is the turnip-fly, and the Hessian-fly, and botfly, and all sorts of worrying, and {112} blood-sucking, and disease-carrying flies, in and out of houses; and gnats and midges, and fleas in seaside lodgings, and wasps, and beetles, such as the cockchafer and blackbeetle--are not all these pests? This is the indoor mind--its view of external nature--which makes the society of indoor people unutterably irksome to me, unless (it will be understood) when I meet them in a house, in a town, where they exist in some sort of harmony, however imperfect, with their artificial environment. [Sidenote: Insects in visible nature]