METAMORPHOSES. (<Q 



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

 a nonplus all the sceptical oppugners of such transforma- 

 tions. And 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 in- 

 sects, "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 talcs of the ancients were grafted 

 on the changes which they observed to take place in in- 

 sects. The death and revivification of the phoenix, from 

 the ashes of which, before attaining its perfect state, arose 

 first a xvorm [ctkcoXyi^), 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 argument 

 would be thought by those who maintained this doctrine 

 more plausible in favour of the transmigration of souls, 

 than the seeming revivification of the dead chrysalis? 

 What more probable, than that its apparent reassumption 

 of life should be owing to its receiving for tenant the soul 

 of some criminal doomed to animate an insect of similar 

 habits with those which had defiled his human tenement^? 

 At the present day, however, the transformations of 

 insects have lost that excess of the marvellous, which 

 might once have furnished arguments for the fictions of 



" Epist. Dedicat. 



•' " 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 

 thousand 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 fly." Institutes 

 of Menu, 35.3. 



