One grows keenly interested in these curious apparatus, which have anticipated our human inventions. One observes their strange and surprising modes of action, as one would observe the inhabitants of another planet, if he were miraculously transported thither. But what one most yearns to see, what one burns to detect, is some reflection from _within_, some gleam of the torch which is concealed in their inner existence, some appearance of thought. Have they a physiognomy? Can I seize in their strange visage any trace of an intelligence which, judging by their works, so closely resembles our own? Of the expression which touches me in the eye of the dog, and of other animals related to me, shall I detect nothing in the bee, the ant, in those ingenious beings, those creators, which accomplish so many things the dog cannot accomplish? A clever man once said to me: "As a boy I was very partial to insects; I searched about for caterpillars, and made a collection of them. I was especially curious to look in their faces, but never succeeded. All that I could distinguish was confused, dull, melancholy. This discouraged me. I left off making collections." I was but a child in this new study; that is, I was fresh to it, and curious. My special anxiety was to interrogate the countenance of the dumb little world, and to surprise there, in default of voice, the silent thought. Thought? At least, the dream, the obscure and floating instinct. I addressed myself to the ant; an humble being in form and colour, but endowed with a prodigious amount of social instinct and of the educational capacity; not to speak of its quickness of resource, of the promptitude with which it confronts perils, and chances, and embarrassments. I take then an ant of the commonest species--a neutral ant--one of the workers who are relieved from the wants of love, and in whom therefore the sex, diminished to a minimum for the advantage of labour, develops so much more powerfully its extraordinary instinct; who alone perform all the diverse trades of the little community, and are purveyors, nurses, architects, and inventors. I selected a very fine, serene, and luminous day--not luminous with the glare of summer, but the calm radiance of autumn (1st September 1856). I was alone, in a state of perfect silence and repose, and in that complete forgetfulness of the world which is so rarely obtained. After the manifold agitations of the past and present, my heart for a moment was at peace. Never was I more ready to hear the mute voices which do not address themselves to the ear, to penetrate in a calm and benevolent spirit the mystery of the little world which on every side surrounds us, and yet has hitherto remained out of our reach and apart from our communications. Alone with my ant, armed with a tolerably good lens, with a magnifying power of twelve, I placed it delicately on a large sheet of fine white paper which covered nearly the whole table.