In this branch of labour, the stumbling-block of the artist, who is an artist and nothing more, is that he may do very well, but make Nature coquettish, add the pretty to the beautiful, and flourish those graces and daintinesses which secure for a scientific treatise the favour of fashionable ladies. Nothing of this kind is discernible in the work of Sybille de Mérian, but on every page a noble vigour, a masculine gravity, a courageous simplicity. At the same time, a close inspection, especially of the illustrations coloured by her own hand, discovers in the softness, breadth, and fulness of the plants, their lustrous and velvety freshness,--the tones either dead or enamelled, and, as it were, flowered, which the insects offer,--the tender, conscientious hand of a woman who has laboured upon the whole with a reverence inspired by love. We have seen (p. 180), in our chapter on the _Fire-Flies_, the astonishment of the timid German in a world so new, when the savages brought her its living materials,--venomous herbs, lizards, and snakes, and fantastic serpents. But the very strangeness of this nature, the emotions of the painter trembling before her models, the restless attention with which she sought to seize the changeful physiognomy and mysterious manners, while keenly agitating her heart, did but awaken her genius. Never satisfied by her representations of fugitive realities, she believed she could make each insect properly known only by painting it under all its forms (caterpillar, nymph, butterfly). And this not contenting her, she placed beneath it the vegetable on which it fed, and by its side the lizard, serpent, or spider which fed upon _it_. Thus, the mutuality and exchange of nature was clearly shown; you saw clearly that formidable circulation, which, in tropical climates, is so rapid. Each of those fine plates, so harmonious and so complete, instructs not only by its truthful details, but inspires a profound sympathy with life, which is a very different and much more valuable teaching. One thing strikes me, which, however, this love explains. She has painted side by side those creatures which devour one another. They draw close together, each faces its antagonist, and you conclude that a frightful duel is imminent. But she has generally concealed the tragic struggle. She has shrunk from painting death. How much more terrible would have been her task had she advanced further, had she opened and dissected her models, and forced her feminine pencil to the lugubrious painting of anatomical detail!