INDIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 251 



ness to exert his faculties in inventing means to guard 

 against their attacks. It is a wise provision that there 

 should exist a race of beings empowered to remove all 

 her superfluous productions from the face of nature; 

 and in effecting this, whatever individual injury may 

 arise, insects must be deemed general benefactors. Even 

 the locusts which lay waste whole countries clear the 

 way for the renovation of their vegetable productions, 

 which were in danger of being destroyed by the exu- 

 berance of some individual species, and thus are ful- 

 filling the great law of the Creator, that of all which 

 he has made nothing should be lost. A region, Sparr- 

 man tells us, which had been choked up by shrubs, per- 

 ennial plants, and hard half-withered and unpalatable 

 grasses, after being made bare by these scourges, soon 

 appears in a far more beautiful dress, clothed with new 

 herbs, superb lilies, and fresh annual grasses, and young 

 and juicy shoots of the perennial kinds, affording deli- 

 cious herbage for the wild cattle and game ''. And though 

 the interest of individual man is often sacrificed to the 

 general good, in many cases the insect pests which he 

 most execrates, will be found to be positively beneficial 

 to him, unless when suffered to increase beyond their 

 due bounds. Thus the insects that attack the roots of 

 the grasses, and, as has been before observed, so mate- 

 rially injure our herbage, the wire-worm, the larvae of 

 Melolontha vulgaris^ Tipula oleracea, &c., in ordinary 

 seasons only devour so much as is necessary to make 

 room for fresh shoots, and the production of new herb- 

 age ; in this manner maintaining a constant succession 

 of young plants, and causing an annual though partial 



^ Sparrman's Voyage, i. 367. 



