This pitiless judge, pitiless even in its treatment of the flowers, behaves with terrible severity towards the human flower. The freshest and most charming will act wisely in not attempting the experiment. She would shudder at herself. Her dimples would deepen into abysses! The light down of the peach which crowns her beautiful skin with the bloom of delicacy would show like rough thickets, or rather like savage forests. After my first experiment, I felt that the too truthful oracle not only altered our ideas of proportion, but of appearances, colours, forms--transfiguring everything, in fact, from the false to the true. Let us be resigned. Whatever the organ of truth may tell us, I thank it, and I will welcome it though it declare me to be a monster. But such is not the case. If it change with some severity our notions of the surface, on the other hand it reveals to us worlds of truly unbounded beauty beneath it. A hundred things in anatomy which seem horrible to the unassisted sight, acquire a touching and impressive delicacy, and a poetical charm which approaches the sublime. This is not the place for discussing such a subject. But a mere drop of blood, of a brickdust-red by no means agreeable to the naked eye, heavy, thick, and opaque, if you look at it when dry, under the magnifying glass, presents to you a delicious rose-bloom arborescence, with delicate ramifications as fine and subtle as those of the coral are coarse and dull. But let us keep to our insects. Let us select the most miserable--the wonderfully little butterfly of the clothes-moth, that dirty white butterfly which seems the lowest of created beings. Take only his wing. Nay, far less, only a little dust, the light powder which covers his wing. You are astounded at seeing that Nature, exhausting the most ingenious industry in order that this offcast of creation may fly at his ease, and without fatigue, has scattered over his wing, not dust, but a multitude of tiny balloons. Or, if you prefer it, so many parachutes, most convenient instruments for flight, which, when opened, sustain the little aeronaut without fatigue and for an indefinite period; which, as they are more or less expanded, enable it to rise or sink; and when folded up, permit of its remaining quiet. The least of the butterflies, thus supported, has a faculty of flight as unlimited as the noblest bird of heaven.