Let us consider the terebinth louse; it is just a little yellow mite; but
is it nothing else? Its genealogical history teaches us "by what amazing
essays of passion and variety the universal law which rules the
transmission of life is evolved. Here is neither father nor eggs; all these
mites are mothers; and the young are born living, just like their mothers."
To this end "almost the whole of the maternal substance is disintegrated
and renewed and conglobated to form the ovarium...the whole creature has
become an egg, which has, for its shell, the dry skin of the tiny creature,
and the microscope will show a whole world in formation...a nebulosity as
of white of egg, in which fresh centres of life are forming, as the suns
are condensed in the nebulae of the heavens." (7/1.)

What is this fleck of foam, like a drop of saliva, which we see in
springtime on the weeds of the meadows; among others on the spurge, when
its stems begin to shoot, and its sombre flowers open in the sunlight? "It
is the work of an insect. It is the shelter in which the Cicadellina
deposits her eggs. What a miraculous chemist! Her stiletto excels the
finest craft of the botanical anatomist" by its sovereign art of separating
the acrid poison which flows with the sap in the veins of the most venomous
plants, and extracting therefrom only an inoffensive fluid. (7/2.)

At every step the insects set us problems equally varied. The other
creatures are nearer to us; they resemble us in many respects. But insects,
almost the first-born of creation, form a world apart, and contain, in
their tiny bodies, as Réaumur has admirably said, "more parts than the most
gigantic animals." They have senses and faculties of their own, which
enable them to accomplish actions, which are doubtless very simply related
in reality, but which seem, to our minds, as extraordinary as the habits of
the inhabitants of Mars might, if by chance they were to descend in our
midst. We do not know how they hear, nor how they see through their