Bird and Butterfly, _Berveiller_, 362 [Illustration] Introduction. [Illustration: A HOME AMONG THE MOUNTAINS.] [Illustration] I. THE LIVING INFINITE. We have followed the Bird in all its liberties of flight, and space, and light; but the Earth which we quitted would not quit us. The sweet melodies of the winged world could not prevent us from hearing the murmur of an infinite world of shadow and silence, which, wanting the speech of man, expresses itself, nevertheless, with eloquent force, by means of a myriad mute tongues. A universal appeal made to us simultaneously by all Nature, from the depths of Earth and Sea, from the bosom of every plant, from the very air which we breathe. The eloquent appeal of the ingenious arts of the Insect, of its powers of love so vividly manifested through its wings and colours, in the brilliant scintillation with which it enkindles our nights. [Illustration] An appeal which becomes frightful from the number of those who make it. What is the little tribe of Birds, or that of Quadrupeds, compared with them? All the animal species, all the various forms of life, brought face to face with this one family, disappear, and are as nothing. Put the world on one side, and on the other the Insect World; the latter has the advantage. Our collections contain about one hundred thousand species. But taking into consideration that every plant at the least nourishes three, we obtain the result, according to the number of known plants, of three hundred and sixty thousand species of insects! And each, be it remembered, of prodigious fecundity. Now call to mind that every creature nourishes other creatures on its surface, in the thickness of its solids, in its fluids, and in its blood; that each insect is a little world inhabited by insects; and that these again have parasites of their own. Is this all? No; in the masses men have supposed to be mineral or inorganic, animals are now revealed to us of which it would take a thousand millions to form one inch in thickness,--the which do not the less present us with a rough sketch or outline of the Insect, and have a right to be spoken of as _insects commenced_. And what are the numbers of these? A single species accumulates the Apennines out of its _débris_, and with its atoms has raised up that enormous backbone of America, the Cordilleras. [Illustration] * * * * * Having arrived at this point, we think our review is ended. Patience! The molluscs, which in the Southern Seas have created so many islands,--which literally pave, as recent soundings have shown, the twelve hundred leagues of Ocean separating us from America,--these molluscs are qualified by many naturalists with the name of _embryo insects_; so that their fertile tribes form, as it were, a dependency of the higher race,--candidates, one might say, for the rank of Insect.