INTRODUCTORY LETTER. 45 



That insects should thus have forestalled us in our inventions ought to 

 urge us to pay a closer attention to them and their ways than we have 

 hitherto done, since it is not at all improbable that the result would be 

 many useful hints for the improvement of our arts and manufactures, and 

 perhaps for some beneficial discoveries. The painter might thus probably 

 be furnished with more brilliant pigments, the dyer with more delicate 

 tints, and the artisan with a new and improved set of tools. In this last 

 respect insects deserve particular notice. All their operations are per- 

 formed with admirable precision and dexterity ; and though they do not 

 usually vary the mode, yet that mode is always the best that can be con- 

 ceived for attaining the end in view. The instruments also with which 

 they are provided are no less wonderful and various than the operations 

 themselves. They have their saws, and files, and augers, and gimblets, 

 and knives, and lancets, and scissors, and forceps, with many other similar 

 implements ; several of which act in more than one capacity, and with a 

 complex and alternate motion to which we have not yet attained in the 

 use of our tools. Nor is the fact so extraordinary as it may seem at first, 

 since " He who is wise in heart and wonderful in working" is the inventor 

 and fabricator of the apparatus of insects ; which may be considered as a 

 set of miniature patterns drawn for our use by a Divine hand. I shall 

 hereafter give you a more detailed account of some of the most striking 

 of these instruments ; and if you study insects in this view, you will be 

 well repaid for all the labor and attention you bestow upon them. 



But a more important species of instruction than any hitherto enume- 

 rated may be derived from entomological pursuits. If we attend to the 

 history and manners of insects, they will furnish us with many useful 

 lessons in Ethics, and from them we may learn to improve ourselves in 

 various virtues. We have indeed the inspired authority of the wisest of 

 mankind for studying them in this view, since he himself wrote a treatise 

 upon them, and sends his sluggard to one for a lesson of wisdom.^ And if 

 we value diligence and indefatigable industry, judgment, prudence, and 

 foresight, economy, and frugality ; if we look upon modesty and diffidence 

 as female ornaments ; if we revere parental affection ; of all these, and 

 many more virtues, insects in their various instincts exhibit several striking 

 examples, as you will see in the course of our correspondence. 



With respect to religious instruction insects are far from unprofitable; 

 indeed in this view Entomology seems to possess peculiar advantages 

 above every other branch of Natural History. In the larger animals, 

 though we admire the consummate art and wisdom manifested in their 

 structure, and adore that Almighty power and goodness, which by a won- 

 derful machinary, kept in motion by the constant action and re-action of 

 the great positive and negative powers of nature, maintains in full force 

 the circulations necessary to life, perception, and enjoyment ; yet as there 

 seems no disproportion between the objects and the different operations 

 that are going on in them, and we see that they afford sufficient space for 

 the play of their systems, we do not experience the same sensations of 

 wonder and astonishment that strike us when we behold similar operations 

 carried on without interruption in animals scarcely visible to the naked 



' 1 Kings, iv. 33. Prov, vi. 6—8. 



