INSECTS. Ill 



layers of which each air-tube consists, an elastic 

 thread is interposed, coiled in close spirals, of 

 sufficient strength and firmness to maintain the 

 channel always pervious, but not at all interfering 

 with its flexiijility ; and this fibre, delicate as it is, 

 may be traced with the microscope even through the 

 utmost ramifications of the air-tubes. Wonderful 

 are the results obtained by the adoption of this new 

 arrangement. Not only is the body of the insect 

 lightened to the uttermost, but the little creature, 

 thus breathing in every part, has its vitality so 

 intensified that it is, in proportion to its bulk, the 

 stroDgest of created things — a living railway engine, 

 or compared with which a railway engine is a baby's 

 toy. Insects are proverbially of small dimensions. 

 Their presence around us is only remarked as con- 

 ferring additional life and gaiety on the landscape, 

 and except when by some inordinate increase in their 

 numbers, they make up by their multitude for their 

 diminutive size, the ravages committed by them are 

 trifling and insignificant. Far otherwise would it 

 be if they attained to larger growth, and still possessed 

 the extraordinary strength with which they are now 

 so conspicuously gifted ; they would then indeed 

 become truly the tyrants of Creation — monsters such 

 "as fables never feigned nor fear conceived," fully 

 adequate to exterminate from the surface of the 

 earth all that it contains of vegetable or of animal 

 existence. A common flea or grasshopper will spring 

 two hundred times the length of its own body, which 

 is as though a man should at a single bound leap 

 over tlie ball and cross of St. Paul's Cathedral. The 

 dragon-fly possesses such indomitable strength of 

 wing that, for a day together, it will sustain itself in 

 the air and fly with equal facility and swiftness 

 backwards or forwards, to the right or to the left, 

 without turning. The beetles are encased in a dense 

 and hard integument impervious to ordinary violence ; 

 and we may add that the wasp and the termite ant 

 will penetrate, with their jaws, the hardest wood. 



