INSECTS INJURIOUS TO VEGETATION. 385 



from time to time. The supposed new species, made known to us first by their un- 

 wonted depredations, may have come to us from other parts, or may have been driven 

 by the hand of improvement from their native haunts, where heretofore the race had 

 Uved in obscmity, and had thus escaped the notice of man.' 



It is thus indicated that although Dr. Harris recognised the existence of a natural 

 balance between plants and insects and between insects and other animals, he did 

 not attribute it to the working out of natural law, which might be codified and 

 imderstood, but to a " plan of Providence," specially " contrived " for the protection 

 of mankind. He saw no reason to believe that new species of insects were generated 

 or created from time to time, but did not deny the possibility. Were it to occur, 

 the circumstance would be comparable to the introduction of a new species into a 

 region where it was before unknown, and this, according to Dr. Harris, might result 

 in forcing a new mode of life upon indigenous species. Twice in the two pages of his 

 introduction he refers to insects having been driven forcibly from their native haunts, 

 and impelled to live elsewhere, much as individual men and women were driven from 

 England to form colonies in America, and from the newlv formed colonies to found 

 yet others, deeper in the ^\ilderness. He was strongly impressed with the idea that 

 after a species had been as arbitrarily created and introduced into the world as an 

 European insect is arbitrarily transported across the Atlantic and introduced into 

 America, it was constrained to live somehow, by divine decree. If its food-plant were 

 exterminated, it would enforcedly attack another ; or if the forest were destroyed, it 

 would enforcedly live in the plantations of the colonists ; but being supernaturally 

 created, and ordained to live and to perform appointed tasks, it could not die except 

 it were the will of its Creator, or of the demi-god man. Questions of environment 

 and " natural control " of species were all answered by the Mosaic doctrine of super- 

 natural origin, which implies either supernatural or artificial* control of their destinies 

 subsequently. 



From the point of view that man is only a little lower than the angels, and that the 

 whole world, and all that there is of good in it was specially contrived for him, and his 

 enjoyment, there is no other explanation for the plagues of noxious insects than that 

 they represent the machinations of a spirit of evil ; of Beelzebub, the god of flies, or 

 of the devil, who tempted Eve, and who survived to torment the souls of medieval 

 Europeans and of their descendants in Colonial America. The ancient, and generally 

 entertained, belief that such plagues of insects are the products of devilish ingenuity 

 might or might not have been repudiated by Dr. Harris, but it was wide-spread in 

 ancient times, and has survived to this day, in some respects hardly modified by the 

 philosophy of Lamarck and Darwin. We have never succeeded in expurgating our 

 literature, our manner of speech, and our methods of reasoning, of the ancient dogma 

 which assumes the existence of implacable and incorrigible evil, diametrically opposed 

 to implicit and invariable good, both of which are imiate and absolute. Hence we 

 were advised and have endeavoured consistently with this advice, to separate plants, 

 insects and other organisms into two categories, corresponding to good and evil ; 

 good if they were or appeared to be beneficial to the best {i.e., to the human species), 



* Man being supernaturally endowed, artificial control of other species would be 

 super-natural. 



