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INSECT TRANSFORMATIONS. 



that they were poisonous ; and many were in conse- 

 quence afraid to touch soups or salads. Reaumur 

 tliought it incumbent on him to refute this notion at 

 some length ; but we cannot accept his doctrine as 

 very palatable, when he tells us that few dishes of soup 

 or salad are ever prepared without containinp: cater- 

 pillars, and yet all the world are not poisoned thereby, 

 any more than by eating oysters or viper broth. 

 He endeavoured also to account by calculation for 

 their excess, from the data of the female moth lay- 

 ing about four hundred eggs. Now, if there were 

 only twenty caterpillars distributed in a garden, and 

 all lived through the winter, and became moths in 

 the succeeding May, the eggs laid by these, if all 

 fertile, would produce 800,000, a number much more 

 than sufficient to effect great destruction *. Did 

 not Providence, therefore, put causes in operation to 



Transformations of the y moth (Plusia Gamma), a. the agg, 

 greatly magnified, on a morsel of leaf, b, the egg; on a leaf, 



natural size. 



c, the larva. <1, the pupa, e, the moth. 

 * Reaumur, ii, 337. 



