Behold, then, microscope, and scalpel, and all our instruments expelled. What could we do? The confiding animal had taken up a position at our fireside, and would not withdraw from it. Life had driven out Science. Grave study, wait! for awhile thou art adjourned. During the winter we respected the sleep of the chrysalis. [Illustration] [Illustration: Illustrative Notes.] [Illustration] Illustrative Notes. NOTE 1. _The Meaning of this Book._--It has sprung wholly from the heart. Nothing has been given up to the intellect, nothing to systems. We have abstained from entering into scientific disputes. If the following formula should seem to you too systematic, pass over it. We have not sought to embody a dogma in it. We would only simplify, if possible, the point of view, and place it in the reader's power to embrace the whole significance of the book. The point of departure is violent. It is the gigantic and necessary war waged by the insect upon all morbid or encumbering life that might prove an obstacle to life. A terrible war, an infernal toil, which, ensures the safety of the world. This powerful accelerator of the universal passage should destroy like fire. But to secure the sharpness of action such a mission requires, it is necessary that its own transformations be accelerated, its life compressed; that from love to death, and death to love, it revolve in a burning circle. However brief may be this circle, it cannot be accomplished but at the cost of painful metamorphoses, which resemble a series of successive deaths. Among most insects, marriage means the death of the father; maternity, the death of the mother. Thus the generations pass away without knowing one another. The mother loves her daughter, anticipates her birth, often immolates herself for her sake, but will never see her. This cruel contradiction, this harsh denial which Nature opposes to the most pathetic aspirations of love, apparently inflames and irritates it. It gives everything unreservedly, knowing that it is for death. It draws from it two powers; on the one hand, unheard _tongues of light and colour_, ravishing phantasmagorias, in which love is not translated, but expands in rays, and pharos-fires, and torches, and burning sparks. It is the appeal to the rapid present, the lightning and the thunder of happiness. But the love of the to come, the foreseeing tenderness for that which not yet is, is expressed in another fashion by the astonishingly complex and ingenious creation of a storehouse of implements, whence all our mechanical arts have derived their most perfect models. Usually this grand apparatus of tools serves but for a day; it enables them at the moment they forsake the orphan to improvise the cradle which shall continue the mother, shall perpetuate the incubation when the mother ceases to exist.