180 NORTH AMERICAN INSECTS. 
ful properties of reason and judgment. ow many persons 
who have found a disgusting little worm in an apple have 
ever thought that they never can find but one in each ap- 
ple? Yet so it is Mow many have ever dreamed that 
that worm, if allowed to live, would become a moth, and 
reproduce itself over and over again, and yet among the 
myriads of such insects there would be deposited but one 
egg on each fruit? How do other moths know that there 
is an egg already deposited there, or that there is already a 
caterpillar within the fruit? How do they know their eggs 
will not fructify upon ground already occupied by another? 
Is it instinct or reason teaches them these things, and marks 
their course with so much accuracy ? 
Again, look at another phenomenon connected with this 
wonderful little caterpillar. Cut an apple open thatm@on- 
tains one of these inhabitants, and you see the whole quan- 
tity of its black, granular excrements tied together by silky 
filaments, produced by this worm, in order to prevent these 
minute grains from rolling about and impeding its motions. 
Is not this contrivance, thought, design? Is it reason or in- 
stinct that guides their tiny but wonderful course? Were 
these little bubbles of foam on Life’s great ocean wafted to 
our barks in vain? Were these animated atoms sent crawl- 
ing on the choicest fruit that we gather with our hands, or 
carry to our mouths, to exhibit in their ephemeral existence 
only a striking illustration of Nature’s nice adaptation of 
means to an end? 
Or were they created, solitary preachers on each little 
globe of fruit, which falls like manna from above, to teach 
us some great moral lesson? Come they into our very 
faces to remind us how “dearly we pay for the primal 
fall?” Do they inhabit the finest specimens of that fruit 
by which our first mother was tempted, in order to bid us 
taste the viands of Eden, and make us feel that “ the trail 
of the serpent hangs over them all?” . 
