148 INSECT LIFE IN A GREAT FOREST. 



and reconstitute every part of the frame of the living 

 man. Thus the man we know at fifty, is not the same 

 man, in his corporeal body, as the man we remember 

 at twenty or thirty ; though the same soul inhabits 

 the bodily frame, its earthly tenement has been so 

 often repaired, renewed, and gradually reconstituted 

 from time to time, in its various parts, that it is 

 clothed in what is in truth a different body. And 

 even as to the mind (the soul that is), we are all of 

 us conscious of the great changes that are at work 

 there : the whole characters and opinions of some men 

 have undergone not one, but perhaps several consecutive 

 changes, each so marked in its intensity as to make 

 the individual " quite another man, " as it is sometimes 

 popularly said of him. Incessant change may therefore 

 be regarded as a constant law pervading the whole 

 economy of Nature. There seems to be no exception 

 to this rule, so that the flight of time itself is not more 

 steady in its march than that of the changes which 

 everywhere accompany it. In a great forest however 

 these facts are brought more clearly into view, than in 

 any than region and therefore we have specially called 

 attention to them here. 



A most curious study also is the infinite number of 

 varieties of the forms of life, both animal and vegetable, 

 which exist upon the decaying substances of a great 

 forest. These, of course, belong almost exclusively to 

 the lower forms' of life, and though they are to be 

 found everywhere, they seem to be in greater numbers, 

 and their operations are more distinctly visible in the 

 forest than elsewhere. 



This again would involve us in a really interminable 

 range of enquiry, did we venture to go further than 



