Preface.

And surely, if the fabric of insects was worthy of such a divine architect, why should the contemplation of them be unworthy of the minds of little men? Among the Palestinian soldiers, God raised up Goliath (the giant of man); but He willed him to be prostrated by the sling of a single shepherd boy. Among the sailors of the Spaniards, how many prevail by the stature of their body? Yet they all yield to the small English Draco a reference to Francis Drake, and Neptune himself in a way submits his trident to him. The oak is great and grows into immense strength; but God diminishes it with the dwarf-like embrace of the ivy, lest it ever grow proud through its own virtue and strength.

Let the swollen estimators of great animals therefore be silent, for just as I recognize God in their mass, I see Him even more in the history of the "little ones." For there is more prudence, sagacity, art, genius, and a certain not-obscure divinity here. Do you wish to praise Nature, the ordinary hand of God? Whence could you seek an origin more than from insects? For where has He placed so many senses in the gnat? Where, as Pliny says, does He extend its sight? Where has He inserted its sense of smell? With what subtlety did He attach its wings? With what art did He lengthen the tiny legs, arrange the empty cavity of its belly, and kindle that eager thirst for human blood? And just as the slenderness of its snout cannot be seen, so He doubled it with reciprocal art, so that it might be simultaneously pointed for boring and tubular for sucking. I pass over the admirable polypoikilian great variety/diversity, beauty, and fecundity of insects, which praise the riches of zoopoietic life-creating Nature to greater theaters and commend to us a certain inexhaustible fruitfulness of it.

If you look at men, just as they almost all take away the vices of bodies (as will be shown more fully in the history), so they bring to the mind various examples of virtues, by which they may instruct and educate souls otherwise wicked. Therefore Solomon, easily the prince of true wisdom among mortals, relegates the lazy to the ant-hill, sends the tumultuous to the troops of the cicada, and incites mortals to the contemplation of the domestic spider, so that we may draw virtue from the school of insects and turn our eyes, too much alienated from Him, more often toward the power of God.

Come now, says Tertullian, do you trust in your own strength, my man, and distrust God? Yet you should note that such great power resides even in His smallest creatures as neither you yourself could ever endure nor produce. Imitate, if you can, the subtlety of the spider; sustain the bite of the spider; avoid the filth of lice; remove the gnat clinging to your throat; sleep through the bite of the bug and the more irritable flea; keep trees unharmed from caterpillars; ward off the weevil, the shipworm, the thrips, and the wood-borer. Therefore, just as God shows His divinity greater in this more spectacled artifice of insects, so His notable mercy shines forth in that almost no disease of mind or body is born for which we do not seek medicine from this storehouse, and heal the health of both. If men denied that these contribute to the nourishing, fattening, and healing of other animals, the citizens of the sea and the air would speak out, and the brute beasts themselves that feed on herbs would clearly say so. Wherefore, however much everything difficult to attain and new is, to the many, slanderous by nature, and this work is therefore tied to curiosity, ostentation, and uselessness by the laziness of the unlearned or the perversity of the malevolent:

Yet here in a thin image of things, much of
Nature and fate lies, and a grand origin.

I therefore exhort those greatest men, who have deserved best regarding the history of insects through the communication of both facts and icons (whom I named at the beginning), that with the same humanity they have thus far shown to Pennius and me, they should proceed daily in increasing this work; for thus they will truly be esteemed, as they are heard, iatron paides sons of physicians. They will most amply proclaim the glory of God and Nature. If I seem to have consulted only so much for the certain utility of mortals in this work, I would not turn my hand from a Zoilus a proverbial critic; for I have never studied to please everyone, and nevertheless I have always strived to offer some part of gratitude to the creator of all things.