Preface.

Do you demand justice? Look to the ant. Do you desire justice? Observe the bee. Do you praise temperance? Consult both. Do you proclaim fortitude? Behold the race of cicadas. Nay, consider even the gnat (a small insect, to say the least), driving its tiny, tubular proboscis through the dense hide of a lion, where you could scarcely or hardly ever reach with sword or spear. For man, iron is needed to pierce wood, which the shipworm original: "Teredo" excavates with its teeth, carving seals as if with the stylus of some Polycletus a famous ancient Greek sculptor. If, indeed, I wished to narrate their skill in building, fighting, playing, and working, I might perhaps seem too curious in the smallest matters (of which the law does not care) and too negligent of greater ones.

Now I come to their use, which is indeed manifold and, when you consider God, Nature, and Man, very great. For if, according to the opinion of Saint Paul, the nations know God from His creatures, they surely perceive His omnipotence, majesty, and providence from these, as if from a higher lighthouse. For some of them are so minute that (like the lines of Callicrates an artist famed for miniature work) they cannot be seen except by certain eyes and in the fullest light of the sun: such a fly I remember seeing, far more slender than a gnat.

Do you desire a musician? Listen to the cicada, which, filled with perpetual song, lives without food and challenges the nightingale with a certain most sweet melody. Would you hear a trumpeter? Incline your ear to the beehive; hear the bumblebee; listen for a while to the gnat, into whose tiny snout that supreme Daedalus mythological master craftsman instilled that fierce and clangorous voice, like a trumpet. Do you despise the louse? Yet when those Egyptian magi displayed figures of greater animals to Pharaoh, they surrendered to Moses in the construction of this one base creature. Rightly, therefore, did Galen, in the 17th book On the Use of Parts, after explaining the wondrous generation and use of hair, burst forth into these words:

If (he says) there is such divine virtue in such base and insignificant parts, how great must one think the excellence of that which governs the heart and the brain to be?

Surely, if any man, addicted to no sect but entering upon the consideration of things with a free mind, has seen such a mind dwell in the vilest particles, and has likewise seen the construction of any even the smallest animal, he will understand the excellence of the mind that is in man, and will draw Theology from medical principles, which is much greater and more excellent than all Medicine. I believe no nation or society, among whom there is any religion of the gods, has anything similar to the Eleusinian or Samothracian Mysteries; yet they obscurely teach the Mind of all things (which they profess), which shines forth sufficiently in the architecture of all animals. Do not think that such great art of the creator exists in man alone, as the previous discourse explained, but whatever other animal you may wish to dissect, you will find equal art and wisdom in it. Nay, those which you cannot dissect at all will excite in you the greater admiration, the smaller they are. For if very great praise was recently, and deservedly, given to a certain sculptor because he formed Phaeton carried in a chariot within a tiny ring so that he truly expressed the faces, reins, teeth, sixteen feet, and all parts wonderfully articulated: certainly, since that whole work had nothing more excellent than the leg of a flea, the art and virtue of the creator of the flea appear even greater, for he not only formed it, but did so without any labor, and subsequently nourishes and increases it once formed.

Therefore, let us cease to admire colossi of stupendous magnitude any longer, and with the master of true wisdom, let us come from the cedar to the moss, that is, from the highest trees to the discarded herb, or rather to the apodeuma dregs or refuse of herbs. If he thought the history of the smallest herb not unworthy of a King, surely, by how much animals are more excellent than plants, by so much more this work deserves royal patronage and philosophical contemplation. When Heraclides had invited his friends to his hut, they are said to have stood before the door, deterred by the narrowness of the place or the squalor of the building. To whom he said:

Enter, he says, for even here are gods.

Clearly implying that God is greatest in the smallest things, and that a Mind dwells in all base things whatsoever.