Is the fixed and immovable mask, thus condemned to perpetual silence, that of a monster or a spectre? No. After watching its movements, its numerous actions indicative of reflection, its arts so much more advanced than those of the larger animals, we are not unwilling to believe that in this head exists a personality. And from the highest to the lowest in the scale of life, we recognize the identity of the soul. [Illustration] [Illustration: III.--THE INSECT, THE AGENT OF NATURE.] CHAPTER III. THE INSECT AS THE AGENT OF NATURE IN THE ACCELERATION OF DEATH AND LIFE. The insect has not my languages. He neither speaks by voice nor physiognomy. In what manner, then, does he express himself? He speaks by his energies. 1st. By the immense destructive influence he exercises on the superabundance of Nature, on a swarm of lingering or morbid lives which he hastens to sweep away. 2nd. He speaks also by his visible energies, especially in the moment of love, his colours, his fires, his poisons (many of which are among our therapeutic agents). [Illustration] 3rd. He speaks by his arts, which might fecundate our human inventions. This is the subject of our second book. Let us first attack the point where he wounds us most, and seems the auxiliary of death: his immense, ardent, and indefatigable work of destruction. Let us contemplate him in history, and begin at the remotest epoch. * * * * * In answer to our littlenesses, our disgusts, our terrors, to the narrow and egotistical judgments which we bring to bear upon such subjects, we must recall the great and necessary reactions of Nature. It has not advanced with the order of a continuous flood, but with refluxes and recoils back upon itself, which have enabled it to compass a perfect harmony. Our short-sighted survey, frequently arrested by these apparently retrograde movements, grows alarmed, takes fright, and misconceives the character of the whole. It is peculiar to the Infinite Love, which is continuously creating, to raise every created thing to the Infinite. But in this very infinity, it stimulates a creation of antagonisms which shall reduce the extent of the preceding. If we see it produce monstrous destroyers, be sure that they are destined, as a remedy and a repression, to check some monsters of fecundity. The herbivorous insects have had the task of keeping under the alarming vegetable accumulations of the primeval world. But these herbivora exceeding all law and all reason, the insectivorous insects were created to confine them within limits. The latter, robust and terrible, the tyrants of creation by their weapons and their wings, would have been the conquerors of the conquerors, and have driven to extremities the feebler species, if, above all the insect world and its weak powers of flight, had not risen on mighty wing a superior tyrant--the Bird. The haughty libellula was carried off by the swallow.