Metamorphoses of Insects. 269 



certain period assimilates to itself the animal substances by which 

 it is siirroimded ; has its organs gradually developed ; and at 

 lenn^th breaks throuMi the shell which encloses it. 



This explanation strips the subject of every thing miraculous, 

 yet by no means reduces it to a simple or uninteresting operation. 

 Our reason is confounded at the reflection that a larva, at first not 

 thicker than a thread, includes the germs of its own triple, or 

 sometimes octuple, teguments ; the case of a chrysalis, and of a 

 bntterfly, all curiously folded in each other ; with an apparatus of 

 vessels for breathing and digesting, of nerves for sensation, and of 

 muscles for moving; and that these various forms of existence 

 will undergo their successive evolutions, by aid of a few leaves 

 received into its stomach. And still less able are we t(> compre- 

 hend how this organ should at one time be capable of digesting 

 leaves, at another onl}" honey ; how one while a silky fluid should 

 be secreted, at another none ; or how organs at one period 

 essential to the existence of the insect should at another be cast 

 off, and the whole system which supported them vanish. * 



Nor does this explanation, though it precludes the idea of that 

 resemblance, in every particular, which, at one time, was thouo-ht 

 to obtain between the metamorphosis of insects, especially of the 

 Lcpidoptera order, and the resurrection of the body, do away that 

 general analogy which cannot fail to strike every one who at all 

 considers the subject. Even Swammerdam, whose observations 

 have proved that the analogy is not so complete as had been 

 imagined, speaking of the metamorphosis of insects, uses these 

 strong words : " This process is formed in so remarkable a manner 

 in butterflies, that we see therein the resurrection painted before 

 our eyes, and exemplified so as to be examined by our hands." f 

 To see, indeed, a caterpillar crawling upon the earth sustained by 

 the most ordinary kinds of food, which, when it has existed a few 

 weeks or months unJer this humble form, its appointed work 

 being finished, passes into an intermediate state of seeming death, 

 when it is wound up in a kind of shroud and encased in a coffin. 



* Dr. Herold {Entwickelungs gescJiichte der Schmetterlinge,) and other 

 modern physiologists, deny that tlie germs of the skirls of the caterpillar and 

 chrysalis and of the future butterfly exist in the young caterpillar ; but, for 

 reasons assigned in detail in another place (vol. iii. edit. 5. pp. 52 — 62.) the 

 theory of Swammerdam and Bonnet, as above explained, is here preferred, 



f Hill's Swamm. i. 127. a. 



