INSECT VARIETY. 77 



in darkness, or on irritation, preluded those sombre, inexplicable 

 forebodiug-s paralysing animal nervous systems. It is thus that 

 emulous life, in its desire to perpetuation, ruled by the un- 

 dulatory emanations from the central orb, instinctively shuns 

 this reign of chaos ; and those organisms that awake their 

 gambols and melodies on the borders of the night show by 

 increased delicacy and the employment of their sensorial organs, 

 they are but adapted to people a diffuser day. With these even 

 the white and frosty lunar reflections exert little potency, and 

 are shunned, and the fainter planetary light appears alien. 



The sleep or lethargic periods of flowers, as Sir John Lubbock 

 remarks, exert an influence on the recurrent activity of insects. 

 Those visited by bees close at nightfall ; and, on the other hand, 

 flowers fertilised by nocturnal moths, often pale in colour, open 

 and become fragrant at dusk; those that close at noon, and 

 throughout the day, should also harmonise with the periods 

 of suctoria. It is thus manifest a majority of insects are 

 dependent on the solar beam, either in respect to its light- 

 giving or heating rays; and as a continuance of dull weather 

 alone might retard exclosure, or prevent the union of the sexes, 

 we find traces of parthenogenesis, or the hatching of unfertilised 

 eggs, in Lej)idoptera and Homoptera, and in many kinds retai'd- 

 ment of development, or a capacity for hybernation. 



But light in the abstract exercises its spell. Gnats, moths, 

 beetles, bugs, may-flies, and even Orthoptera, flock to the mid- 

 night lamp; and in tropical countries these vagrants arrive of 

 a calm evening in such numbers as to constitute a domestic 

 nuisance. I may cite my personal experience with a small 

 moth when I was stationed in the Mauritius, near Mahebourg, 

 that used to choke up the candles successively in the course of 

 the evening, while scathed individuals, dropping doAvn, covered the 

 supper-plates like small dust. It multiplied, I think, in the 

 Fil-la-haut or Tamarisk trees that lined the shore. INIoths, then, 

 are pre-eminently dazed and drawn by light, especially those of 

 the heavy, dull-coloured group of our night- fliers, which stand 

 out from the Lepidoptera on account of their exquisite organs of 

 scent and hearing. Many of these, as entomologists are aware, 

 may be procured for the cabinet by merely going the round of 

 street lamps at the fall of evening, or by placing a light at 



