Inhaltsangabe
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1883 edition. Excerpt: ... lightness of certain winter trees, when revealed in their actual figure, and no longer encumbered with leaves. Thus, Nature's infinite potency of beauty is not limited to the surface, as antiquity supposed. It does not trouble itself about human eyesight, but labours for its own behoof, and on its own work. From the surface to the interior, it frequently increases in beauty as in 204 THE CICINDELA EXAMINED. depth. It invests with surpassing loveliness things which are absolutely hidden, and which death alone can unveil. Sometimes, as if to contradict and confound our ideas, it clothes in ravishing forms the organs which, from our point of view, accomplish the vilest functions. I am thinking of the exquisite beauty and delicate tenderness of that coral-tree which incessantly pours out the chyle of our intestines. To return to the insects: beauty abounds in them both externally and internally. One need not search far in order to discover it. Take an insect, not very rare, which I constantly meet with on the sandy soil of Fontainebleau, in localities well open to the sun. Take--but not without precaution, for it is well armed--the brilliant cicindela Even to the naked eye it is an agreeable object; but under the microscope it appears to be perhaps the richest and the most varied which art could study. These are truly surprising creatures! Each individual differs; all are enamelled, and decorated to an excess, without resembling one another. In each, if taken and separately studied, new discoveries may be made. It is the ardent and murderous hunter of other insects, and endowed with formidable weapons,--having for its two anterior mandibles a couple of sickles which close in upon one another, and transfix deeply, on both sides, their...
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