No other creature approaches it. The most sublime and charming, the Bird, is, through these very qualities, also the most individual. Its society is the family; its community, the nest; its associations are only collocations of nests for the sake of security. Those mammals which, approach us so nearly, and impress us so strongly by their advanced organisation,--I mean, the beaver,--show wonderful powers of combination for the execution of their task; but, when the work is done, they retire to their own houses and families, isolated by the very tenderness of their domestic affections. The assembly of the beavers is, as it were, a colony of builders and engineers, where each one lives apart; but they are not citizens, and it is not a city. * * * * * The city is only to be found in the insect world. Separated from man by many degrees in organism, the insect approaches him more closely than any other being in the supreme work of his life,--which is, to live for the many. It has not those touching signs of close relationship which render the higher animals so interesting to us. It has no blood; it has no milk. But I recognize it as akin by one loftier attribute: it has the social sense. * * * * * An ignorant dogmatism had long asserted that the very perfection of these insect-societies depended on their automatism. But modern observation has proved, that if the conditions are varied, and unforeseen obstacles and difficulties placed in their way, they confront them with vigour and calm sense, and with the resources of an unfettered ingenuity, It is a world of _method_, which, at need, can show itself _unrestrained_. A world which, presently, in its original mission of combat and destruction, seemed to us an atrociously fatal force; but which afterwards, by the influence of its maternal devotion, became a world of social harmony, preaching a lofty morality. But is _maternity_ all? No; the community of life introduces the insect to the threshold of a still higher rank of sentiments. Even among those which are isolated--among the necrophori, for example, and the pilulary scarabæi--_fraternal_ co-operation has a beginning. They render mutual services, and fly to the assistance of one another, co-operating in certain works. Among the sociable insects the feeling is carried to a considerable height; the bees feed one another, mouth to mouth, and stint themselves to supply their sisters. A very safe, and by no means romantic observer, saw an ant dressing the wound of another ant which had lost an antenna, by pouring on it some honey-dew to close it up and protect it from the air. See now how far we have advanced from our starting-point, where the insect appeared to us a pure voracious element, a machine of absorption. A great, a sublime metamorphosis, more marvellous than that of the moultings and transformations which guided the egg, the grub, the nymph, to the assumption of wings.