] 66 DEFIERS OF FAMINE. 



when called on to surrender, not bv flood or fire but bv 



V > 



famine. We read of a chameleon fly subsisting nine months 

 upon air, of a church-yard beetle living without food for 

 three years, of sheep-lice existing twelve months in a shorn 

 fleece; while the grub of an aphis-eating fly,* left under a 

 glass, was found alive three months afterwards, the thread of 

 its existence having been actually eight times doubled by the 

 very circumstance seeming most adapted to cut it short. 



There is yet another agent of destruction, more piercing 

 than Frost, more overwhelming than Water, more consuming 

 than Tire, more wasting than Famine a destroyer, not of 

 matter only but of mind, which has, nevertheless, been set at 

 defiance by the principle of insect life. 



This destroyer is a spirit that deadly spirit drawn from " the 

 vasty deeps ' of the distiller's infernal shades, which, in the 

 shape of Geneva, was once tried by Kirby, without effect, upon a 

 lady-bird. But let us give the experiment in the words of the 

 relator, whose delightful work on insects might never have 

 been written, but for the interest and wonder it excited : 

 " One morning," he says, " I observed on my study window 

 a little yellow lady-bird with black dots. ' You are very pretty/ 

 said I to myself, ' and I should like to have a collection of 

 such creatures/ Immediately, I seized my prey, and not 

 knowing how to destroy plunged it in Geneva. After leaving 

 it in this situation a day and a night, and seeing it without 



* By Kirby. 



