228 MEANS OF DEFENCE OF INSECTS. 



hours ; when taken out of the water they immediately 

 showed signs of life, and out of four, three survived the 

 experiment: an immersion of twenty-four hours, how- 

 ever, proved fatal to them a . 



The late ingenious, learned, and lamented Dr. Reeve 

 of Norwich once related to me that he found in a hot 

 fountain on the top of a mountain, near Leuk in the 

 Valais in Switzerland, in which the thermometer stood 

 at 205, transparent larvae, probably of gnats, or some 

 such insect. Lord Bute also, in a letter to my late re- 

 vered friend, the Rev. William Jones of Nayland, im- 

 parts a similar observation made by His Lordship at 

 the baths of Abano, near the Euganian mountains, on 

 the borders of the Paduan states. They are strong, 

 sulphureous, boiling springs, oozing out of a rocky emi- 

 nence in great numbers, and spreading over an acre of 

 the top of a gentle hill. In the midst of these boiling 

 springs, within three feet of five or six of them, rises a 

 tepid one about blood warm. But the most extraordi- 

 nary circumstance which he relates is, that not only con- 

 fervas were found in the boiling springs, but numbers of 

 small black beetles, that died upon being taken out and 

 plunged into cold water 5 . And once, having taken in 

 the hot dung of my cucumber-bed a small beetle (Syn- 

 cliita Juglandis), I immersed it in boiling water ; and 

 after keeping it submerged a sufficient time, as I thought, 

 to destroy it, upon taking it out, and laying it to dry, it 

 soon began to move and walk. Its native station being 

 of so high a temperature, Providence has fitted it for it, 



a Linn. Trans, vi. 84. 



b J. Mason Good's Anniversary Oration, delivered March 8, 1808, 

 before the Medical Society of London, p. 31. 



