170 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 
The Tent-caterpillars. 
It is interesting to notice how various principles and 
habits of mankind are illustrated in the different phases of 
insect life. So very striking are some of these coincidences 
that we can not avoid the inference that the social customs 
of society were originally borrowed directly from Nature, 
and that there was a time when man and beast alike fol- 
lowed only Nature’s teaching. The more artificial become 
our habits and customs, the farther removed they are from 
the purity and simplicity of nature, and the more depend- 
ent upon a conceited and hollow-hearted hypocrisy. 
Among the insects we have already noticed some of the 
monarchs and aristocrats, the tyrants and the brain-feeders. 
Now we come to a peaceful working class, bound together 
by a community of interest, and all laboring together for 
the common good. ‘The Tent-caterpillars are the purest 
Socialists in the entomological world, and there is more of 
pleasure to be derived from a perusal of their history than 
from that of many a country and nation of the old conti- 
nent; because the latter is so filled up with the disgusting 
biographies of vile despots, their crimes and wholesale mur- 
ders, that the mind revolts from its contemplation. But in 
the history of this insect tribe we see something that re- 
minds us of our own free country, of the mutual depend- 
ence of the States, and of the common interests that makes 
us “ # pluribus unum.’ God grant that motto may ever 
float upon her banners and be engraved upon the hearts of 
her people! that as her history has been, so it may ever be, 
the purest and the brightest in the Book of Nations, because 
the truest to those principles of charity and benevolence 
which even dumb nature teaches us are the best calculated 
to produce general happiness and prosperity! that as we 
have now witnessed how union and harmony augment even 
the smallest things, “‘ Concordia res parve crescunt,” we may 
