252 INDIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 



ductions 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 exuberance of some individual 

 species, and thus are fulfilling the great law of the Cre- 

 ator, that of all which he has made nothing should be lost. 

 A region, Sparrman tells us, which had been choked 

 up by shrubs, perennial 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 delicious herbage for the wild cattle and game a . 

 And though the interest of individual man is often sacri- 

 ficed 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 ma- 

 terially 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 herbage; 

 in this manner maintaining a constant succession of young 

 plants, and causing an annual though partial renovation 

 of our meadows and pastures. In the rich fields near Rye 

 in Sussex I particularly observed this effect ; and I have 

 since at home remarked, that at certain times of the year 

 dead plants may be every where observed, pulled up by the 

 cattle as they feed, whose place is supplied by new offsets. 

 * Spamnan's Voyage, i. 367- 



