Metamorphoses of Insects. 267 



altogether different from tliose which it has previously borne — a 

 perfect beetle, butterfly, or other insect. This Linne termed the 

 imago state, and the animal that had attained to it the imago; 

 because, having laid aside its ma^k^ and cast off its swaddling 

 hands, being no longer disguised or confined, or in any respect 

 imperfect, it is now become a true representative or image of its 

 species. This state is in general referred to when an insect is 

 spoken of without the restricting terms larva or pupa. 



Such being the singularity of the transformation of insects, you 

 will not think the ancients were so wholly unprovided with a 

 show of aro-ument as we are accustomed to consider them, for 

 their belief in the possibility of many of the marvellous metamor- 

 phoses which their poets recount. Utterly ignorant as they were 

 of modern physiological discoveries, the conversion of a caterpillar 

 into a butterfly must have been a fact sufficient to put to a 

 nonplus all the sceptical oppugners of such transformations. x\nd 

 however we may smile, in this enlightened age, at the inference 

 drawn not two centuries ago by Sir Theodore Mayerne, the editor 

 of Mouffet's Work on Insects, " that if animals are transmuted so 

 may metals," * it was not, in fact, with his limited knowledge 

 on these subjects, so very preposterous. It is even possible that 

 some of the wonderful tales of the ancients were grafted on the 

 changes which they observed to take place in insects. The death, 

 and revivification of the phoenix, from the ashes of which, before 

 attaining his perfect state, arose first a worm [Scolex,) in many 

 of its particulars resembles what occurs in the metamorphoses of 

 insects. Nor is it very unlikely that the doctrine of the 

 metempsychosis took its rise from the same source. What argu- 

 ment would be thought by those who maintained this doctrine 

 more plausible, in favor of the transmigration of souls, than the 

 seeming revivification of the dead chrysalis ^ What more proba- 

 ble than that its apparent re-assumption of life should be owing to 

 its receiving for tenant the soul of some criminal doomed to 

 animate an insect of similar habits wdth those which had defiled 

 his human element ? f 



* Epist. Dedicat. 



f " A priest who has drunk wine shall migrate into a moth or fly, feeding 

 on ordure. He who steals the gold of a priest shall pass a thousaud times 

 into the bodies of spiders. If a man shall steal honey, he shall be born a 

 great stinging gnat ; if oil, an oil-drinking beetle ; if salt, a cicada ; if a 

 household utensil, an ichneumon flj." Institute of Menu, 353. 



