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smooth, slippery surface of the plum, and then trust to blind chance 

 to dispose of it whether for weal or for woe ? No such thing ! Insects 

 are not the miserable, thoughtless, careless, improvident machines 

 that most people suppose them to be. They look before they leap. 

 They understand their business. They know as well as the most skill- 

 ful human mechanic, what would be the consequences of a clumsy 

 movement or an untoward arrangement; and they govern themselves 

 accordingly. Every mother insect has about a hundred, and often 

 several hundreds of eggs to provide for; and although it may, and 

 often does, take weeks or months of the hardest and most unremitting 

 toil, to find or furnish suitable nests or cells or other dejwsitaries for 

 all those eggs, yet, before she dies, her task is almost always accom- 

 plished down to the minutest detail. In the Insect World there are 

 no Foundling Hospitals, no Jails, no Penitentiaries. Yet, without 

 hope of reward for well-doing and without fear of punishment for 

 evil-doing, the mother-insects invariably do their duty towards that 

 future progeny, which in the great majority of cases, they are des- 

 tined never to behold. Do those proud beings, that are foolish enough 

 to fancy that all this beautiful green world — swarming as it is with 

 life and joy upon every inch of its surface — was made for their sole 

 and exclusive benefit, always do the same? Let us blush for our 

 species, when we reflect that the horrible crimes of foeticide and in- 

 fanticide have prevailed, in every age, to a hideous extent among every 

 nation of mankind; while among my little friends, the Insects, whom 

 we are facetiously pleased to classify among the "'lower animals," 

 they are, in the true and correct sense of the terms, utterly unknown. 

 It is undoubtedly the case that the Social Wasps, when at the ap- 

 proach of winter, (with the single exception of the young Queen 

 Wasps, which are destined to pass the winter in a torpid state and to 

 originate new colonies in the following spring,) inevitable starvation 

 stares the whole colony in the face, do, under the stern pressure of 

 necessity, mercifully despatch their young larv^ with their stings, to 

 save them from a painful and lingering death. But how different 

 is this from the conduct of the human mother, who destroys the help- 

 less being that is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, not out of 

 any love for that being, but to cover up her own shame from the eye 

 of the world, or even out of the insane ambition of prolonging the 

 period of her youthful charms, or the mere selfish desire to escape 

 from the troubles and responsil)ilities of motherhood ! With a single 

 •snap of her jaws the mother Plum Gouger can easily destroy that help- 

 less germ of future life and happiness, which is struggling within her 

 to pass into this outer world. She can do it with perfect impunity. 



