It is a world strange to man, but singularly parallel to our own, though having no mutual mode of communication. We invent scarcely anything which has not previously--though for a long time unknown to us--been invented by the insect. What have the great animals discovered? Nothing. Apparently their warmth of life, and their red blood, obscure their mental light. On the contrary, the insect world, free from a heavy apparatus of flesh and blood intoxication, more subtly sensitive, and moved by a nervous electricity, seems a frightful world of spirits. Frightful? No. If terror sit at the threshold of science, safety is found in its _penetralia_. At the first glance the living energy of the invisible may startle us; and with a shudder of alarm we may contemplate in the animalcule the likeness, some flashes of the individuality, or a certain undefinable something which seems like a counterfeit, of man. These gleams, which so troubled the great Swammerdam, and made him recoil with dread, are precisely the circumstances that give me encouragement. Yes; all see, all feel, and all love: a miracle truly religious! In the material infinite which deepens under my eyes, I recognize, for my reassurance, a moral infinite. The individuality hitherto claimed as a monopoly by the pride of the chosen species, I see generously extended to all, and conferred even upon the least. The gulf of life would have seemed to me deserted, desolate, barren, and godless, had I not everywhere discovered the warmth and tenderness of the Universal Love in the universality of the soul. [Illustration] NOTE 2.