But how? Must she indeed perish? Can there be no exception to the pitiless law? In hot climates, especially, many mothers may survive. What if these mothers united together to deceive destiny, by associating so many brief existences in one common and lasting life in which their children should find an eternal mother? How shall we elude death?--Let us create society. The society of mothers. The insect is essentially a female and a mother. The male is an exception, a secondary accident,--frequently, too, an abortion, a caricature of an insect. The dream of the female--maternity, and the safety of her child--the preservation of the future--leads her to create the community, which secures her own safety. This society can only perpetuate itself by ensuring its existence against the season of sterility. Hence results a need of accumulation. Hence proceed labour and economy. But Nature, eluded by the effort and the toil,--I was going to say, the virtue,--does not lose its rights. Beaten on the one side, on the other it reacts upon the commonwealth, and grievously oppresses it. This self-protecting society, while rescuing immense multitudes from death and prolonging the common existence, multiplies the mouths to be fed, and is often overloaded. If its members would not die of famine, they must live on a very scanty regimen, must preserve alive a limited number of fertile females, and condemn the majority, or nearly the whole of the females to celibacy. Reared for virginity and labour, sterilized from the cradle in their maternal powers, they are by no means of barren intellect. The extinction of certain faculties seems to strengthen the others. Such is the institution, ingeniously severe, of aunts or adoptive mothers. With too little sexual feeling to desire love, they possess enough to wish for children, to love and adopt them. They are both less than mothers, and more than mothers. Should invasion or ruin befall the hive or the ant-hill, the true mothers consult their own safety in flight; the devoted aunts or sisters know no other thought but that of saving the children. Elevated by this factitious maternity and disinterested love above itself, the insect surpasses all other creatures,--even those which, like the mammals, are evidently superior in organization. It teaches us that organism is not everything, and that there is a potency in life which acts strongly beyond the range and in despite of the organs. Those species which, like the ants, have no special instruments to facilitate their work, are invariably the most advanced. The noblest work of the world, the most elevated goal to which its inhabitants tend, is the community,--by which I mean a society strongly consolidated. The only being, besides Man, who seems to reach this goal, is undoubtedly the Insect.