62 METAMORPHOSES. 



proboscis to the margin of a drop of wine, and then gaily 

 flying to take a more solid repast from a pear or a peach; 

 now gamboling with his comrades in the air, now grace- 

 fully currying his furled wings with his taper feet, was 

 but the other day a disgusting grub, without wings, 

 without legs, without eyes, wallowing, well pleased, in 

 the midst of a mass of excrement. 



The " grey-coated gnat," whose humming salutation, 

 while she makes her airy circles about your bed, gives 

 terrific warning of the sanguinary operation in which she 

 is ready to engage, was a few hours ago the inhabitant 

 of a stagnant pool, more in shape like a fish than an in- 

 sect. Then to have been taken out of the water would, 

 have been speedily fatal; now it could as little exist in 

 any other element than air. Then it breathed through 

 its tail; now through openings in its sides. Its shape- 

 less head, in that period of its existence, is now ex- 

 changed for one adorned with elegantly tufted antennae, 

 and furnished, instead of jaws, with an apparatus more 

 artfully constructed than the cupping-glasses of the phle- 

 botomist an apparatus which, at the same time that it 

 strikes in the lancets, composes a tube for pumping up 

 the flowing blood. 



The " shard-born beetle," whose " sullen horn," as 

 he directs his " droning flight" close past your ears in 

 your evening walk, calling up in poetic association the 

 lines in which he has been alluded to by Shakespear, 

 Collins, and Gray, was not in his infancy an inhabitant 

 of air; the first period of his life being spent in gloomy 

 solitude, as a grub, under the surface of the earth. The 

 shapeless maggot, which you scarcely fail to meet with 

 in some one of every handful of nuts you crack, would 



