INTERNAL ANATOMY OF INSECTS. 197 
muscle, could suffer carriages to drive over him without 
receiving any injury. Almost as remarkable is the state 
of extreme relaxation into which the muscles of some 
larvae fall, when their animation is suspended ; and the 
revived tension to which a subsequent resumption of the 
vital powers restores them. Bonnet having suspended 
the animation of the caterpillar of Sphinx Ligustri by 
keeping it submerged, squeezed it between his fingers, 
until it had wholly Jost its cylindrical form and was as 
flat and supple as the empty finger of a glove ; yet in 
less than an hour the very same caterpillar became as 
firm, as compact, as cylindrical, and in short, as well, 
as though it had never been submitted to treatment so 
rough a . 
It is fortunate that animals of a large size, as has been 
well remarked, especially noxious ones, have not been 
endowed with a muscular power proportionable to that 
of insects. A cockchafer, respect being had to their size, 
would be six times stronger than a horse • and if the ele- 
phant, as Linne has observed, was strong in proportion 
to the slag-beetle, it would be able to pull up rocks by 
the root, and to level 'mountains 15 . Were the lion and 
the tiger as strong and as swift for their magnitude as the 
Cicindcla and the Carabus, nothing could have escaped 
them by precaution, or withstood them by strength. 
Could the viper and the rattlesnake move with a rapidity 
and force equivalent to that of the lulus and Scolopendra, 
who could have avoided their venemous bite? But the 
Creator in these little creatures has manifested his Al- 
mighty power, in showing what he could have done 
had he so willed; and his goodness in not creating the 
" Bonnet CEuvr. ii. 124. " N. Did. d'Hist, Nat. xxii. 81, 
