e
that are so small that one would be tempted to think at first blush
that Dante paid no attention to them at all, that his powers of
observation as a student of nature, and his all-pervading love for
every even smallest manifestation of her power, is especially made
manifest. With regard to this subject, Prof. Kuhns, to whom I have
already turned so often, has an illuminating {357} passage, which sums
up a large amount of reading of the poet. He says:

"The smallest members of the animal kingdom do not escape the
observing eye of the poet, and such unpoetical insects as the flea,
the gnat, and the fly are brought into use. By means of these latter
he has accurately given the time of day and season of the year in
one line, where, showing us the farmer lying on the hillside of a
summer evening, looking down upon the valley alight with fire-flies,
he says the time was that

'When the fly yields to the gnat.'

Those pests of dogs, the flea and hornet, are referred to in a
passage already given, where the dog is seen snapping and scratching
in agony. The butterfly was symbolical, during the Middle Ages, of
the death and resurrection of the body. The various phases of its
development are referred to by Dante; the caterpillar state, the
latter referring to the cocoon of the silk-worm, furnishing a figure
for the souls in Paradise, swathed in light; in one passage,
backsliding Christians are compared to insects in a state of
arrested development."

Dante's passage in the tenth canto of the Purgatorio, in which he
compares man to the butterfly, who in this life passes through the
caterpillar stage, passing in death, as it were, into the larval stage
when in his coffin he is motionless and apparently dead, as the insect
in its cocoon, yet finally reaching the glory of the resurrection in
the winged butterfly stage, shows how well these medieval observers of
nature had studied carefully aspects of nature which we are apt to
think were holden entirely from their eyes. The passage would remind
one of the story of the Jesuit, three centuries later, who, in {358}
the early days of missionary work in this country, wondered how he
would obtain a fitting word to express to the Indians the abstract
idea of the resurrection of the body. The good Father finally recalled
his Dante, and having found a caterpillar that had entered into the
larval stage after having spun its cocoon and wrapped itself ro