196 STATES OF INSECTS. (Larva.) 
and is worthy to be called a specimen of nature’s mira- 
cles; for it is not the external skin only that these worms 
cast, like serpents, but the throat and a part of the sto- 
mach, and even the inward surface of the great gut, 
change their skin at the same time. But this is not the 
whole of these wonders; for at the same time some hun- 
dreds of pulmonary pipes within the body of the worm 
cast also each its delicate and tender skin. ‘These seve- 
ral skins are afterwards collected into eighteen thicker, 
and, as it were, compounded ropes, nine on each side of 
the body, which, when the skin is cast, slip gently and 
by degrees from within the body through the eighteen 
apertures or orifices of the pulmonary tubes before de- 
scribed, having their tops or ends directed upwards 
towards the head. Two other branches of the pulmo- 
nary pipes that are smaller, and have no points of respi- 
ration, cast a skin likewise.” . . . * If any one separates 
the cast little ropes or congeries of the pulmonary pipes 
with a fine needle, he will very distinctly see the branches 
and ramifications of these several pipes, and also their 
annular composition *.” Bonnet makes a similar obser- 
vation with regard to caterpillars ; but he appears to have 
observed it more particularly, at least the change of the 
intestines, previously to the metamorphosis of the insect, 
when he says with the excrements it casts the inner skin 
of the stomach and viscera®. Both these great men ap- 
pear to have recorded the result of their own actual ob- 
servations with regard to the proceedings of two very 
different kinds of insects ; the one the grub of a beetle, 
and the other the caterpillars of Lepidoptera. The ac- 
* Bibl. Nat. E. Trans.i. 135. col. B. t. xxvii. f. 6. 
> Quwores, viii. 303. 
