CATERPILLARS. 



377 



for it began to be whispered that they were poisonous ; and 

 many were in consequence afraid to touch soups or salads. 

 Keaumur thought it incumbent on him to refute this notion 

 at some length ; but we cannot accept his doctrine as very 



Transformations of the 7 moth (Flusia Gamma'), a, the e.i;g-, greatly magnified, on a 

 morsel of leaf, b, the egg on a leaf, natural size, c, the larva, d, the pupa, e, the 

 ' moth. 



palatable, when he tells us that few dishes of soup or salad 

 are evur prepared without containing caterpillars, 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 laying 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 keep them in due bounds, the 

 caterpillars of this moth alone, leaving out of consideration 

 the 2000 other British species, would soon destroy more than 

 half of our vegetation. 



The caterpillar just mentioned, amongst other pot-herbs, 



*" Keaumur, ii. 337. 



