70 METAMORPHOSES. 



referred to when an insect is spoken of without the re- 

 stricting terms larva or pupa. 



Such being the singularity of the transformations of 

 insects, you will not think the ancients were so wholly 

 unprovided with a show of argument as we are accus- 

 tomed to consider them, for their belief in the possibi- 

 lity of many of the marvellous metamorphoses which 

 their poets recount. Utterly ignorant as they were of 

 modern physiological discoveries, the conversion of a 

 caterpillar into a butterfly, must have been a fact suffi- 

 cient to put to a nonplus all the sceptical oppugners of 

 such transformations. And, however we may smile 

 in this enlightened age at the inference drawn not two 

 centuries ago by Sir Theodore Mayerne, the editor of 

 MoufFet's Avork on insects, " that if animals are trans- 

 muted so may metals %" it was not, in fact, with his 

 limited knowledge on these subjects, so very preposte- 

 rous. It is even possible that some of the wonderful 

 tales of the ancients were grafted on the changes which 

 they observed to take place in insects. The death and 

 revivification of tlie phoenix, from the ashes of which, 

 before attaining its perfect state, arose first a zoorm 

 (cTKctiXr)^), in many of its particulars resembles what oc- 

 curs in the metamorphoses of insects. Nor is it very 

 unlikely that the doctrine of the metempsychosis took 

 its rise from the same source. What argument Avould 

 be thought by those who maintained this doctrine more 

 plausible in favour of the transmigration of souls, than 

 the seeming revivification of the dead ciny sails ? What 

 more probable, than that its apparent reassumption of 

 life should be owing to its receiving for tenant the soul 



" Epist, Dcdicat. 



