INSECTS FRAGILE AS FLOWERS. 145 



In the world of insects, examples of existence, bright and 

 brief and most precarious, are no less common, and in many 

 respects (especially as occurring amongst sensitive beings) in- 

 finitely more striking ; but, except with those sporters of a 

 day, hence called H/pfi,emer&, the frail tenures of insect life 

 seldom, serve to remind us of the like nature of our own, and 

 chiefly, perhaps, for the following reason. Many a brilliant 

 flutterer is cut off in the midst of its joyous activity, much 

 more suddenly than the flower over which we have seen it 

 hover, but ere the scattered petals of the one have strewed the 

 surface of the ground, the wings of the other have borne it to 

 die unseen within some hidden covert; or, contributing in 

 death to the support of life, it may have sunk suddenly into 

 the devouring gulf of some insectivorous bird, or carnivorous 

 feeder of its own race. 



It is, by the way, a remarkable dispensation of Nature's 

 Author, and one equally beautiful and kind, that while Death 

 is for ever busy, as elsewhere, in the lower departments of the 

 animal kingdom, so few of the victims they afford him are 

 permitted to offend the eye in any shapes of disgust or danger. 

 To confine this observation merely to insects : "We see the 

 air teeming with gnats ; the ground populous with ants and 

 beetles ; the fields, especially towards the end of summer, alive 

 with grasshoppers and Tipulidan flies ; the hedges, through the 

 months of June and July, scarcely more abundant in leaves 

 than in the smaller moths, which in daytime make a covert of 



VOL. III. K 



