290 Remarks on a Work entitled 
vellous works of bees and spiders alluded to, by what means are 
they accomplished? Our author is silent. 
SIGHT. 
‘He that would assert the title of insects generally to the pos- 
session of this sense, is already in possession of two important 
arguments to start with. An organ can be pointed out in which 
to lodge the supposed faculty; and as that faculty is, from analogy, 
the most useful of all the senses, it would seem an anomaly that 
an intelligent creature (the intelligence, however, being entirely 
assumed, and for the present unchallenged,) should have been 
created without it. The greater number of insects, then, must be 
admitted to have what most physiologists would eall eyes; but 
whether they are properly so ealled, can only be fully determined 
by the function they exercise, in inquiring into the exercise of 
which it may perhaps be not very difficult to show, that they 
differ entirely from organs of sight as we possess them and un- 
derstand them.” The structure of the eyes of insects is then 
noticed ; and Marcel de Serres and Cuvier are quoted to show 
that their “ composition exhibits externally a cornea of various 
degrees of convexity, cut into facettes or corneules, whereof each 
is supposed to represent an eye. All these corneules are lined 
on their inner surface with an opaque varnish, and this varnish 
affords no passage for the transmission of light. Secondly, a 
number of short hexagonal prisms, entering the concavity of the 
lenses, come into contact with this varnish, and these it is usual 
to consider as so many retinze, each having that relation to the 
particular lens with which it communicates. Next in order comes 
the choroid, which is penetrated by the prisms just mentioned, 
and which are given off from beneath it by the general expansion 
of the optic nerve, properly called the retina.” ...... “The 
insect being absolutely and unavoidably subject to the same ex- 
ternal conditions for vision as ourselves, cannot be supposed to 
see through a black pigment, any more than we can through a 
white cataract ; and as all insects equally have this black pigment, 
all must be equally blind.” 
I was not prepared for this, nor, I should think, are any of my 
hearers. The presence of an optic nerve is not denied; and of 
what use is an optic nerve if not for sight? Mr. Newport has 
proved,* as I thought, that a bee flies straight to its hive by the 
sense of sight alone; but it is said “ if insects want a brain of 
* Trans, Ent. Soc. of London, Vol. LV, p. 57. 
