An animal dies - a solitary beast - and before his unit life has
vanished for one week, bow many millions of living creatures owe
their birth to his death? What countless swarms of insects have
risen from that one carcase! - creatures which never could have
been brought into existence were it not for the presence of one
dead body which has received and hatched the deposited eggs of
millions that otherwise would have remained unvivified.
Not a tree falls, not a withered flower droops to the ground, not
a fruit drops from the exhausted bough, but it is instantly
attacked by the class of insect prepared by Nature for its
destruction. The white ant scans a lofty tree whose iron-like
timber and giant stem would seem to mock at his puny efforts; but
it is rotten at the core and not a leaf adorns its branches, and
in less than a year it will have fallen to the earth a mere
shell; the whole of the wood will have been devoured.
Rottenness of all kinds is soon carried from the face of the land
by the wise arrangements of Nature for preserving the world from
plagues and diseases, which the decaying and unconsumed bodies of
animals and vegetables would otherwise engender.
How beautiful are all the laws of Nature! how perfect in their
details! Allow that the great duty of the insect tribe is to
cleanse the earth and atmosphere from countless impurities
noxious to the human race, how great a plague would our
benefactors themselves become were it not for the various classes
of carnivorous insects who prey upon them, and are in their turn
the prey of others! It is a grand principle of continual strife,
which keeps all and each down to their required level.
What a feast for an observant mind is thus afforded in a tropical
country! The variety and the multitude of living things are so
great that a person of only ordinary observation cannot help
acquiring a tolerable knowledge of the habits of some of the most
interesting classes. In the common routine of daily life they
are continually in his view, and even should he have no taste for
the study of Nature and her productions, still one prevailing
characteristic of the insect tribe must impress itself upon his
mind. It is the natural instinct not simply of procreating their
species, but of laying by a provision for their expected
offspring. What a lesson to mankind! what an example to the
nurtured mind of mail from one of the lowest classes of living
things!
Here we see no rash matrimonial engagements; no penniless lovers
selfishly and indissolubly linked together to propagate large
families Of starving children.
