RAY AND WILLUGHBY 113 



After saying that sharks have the mouth so placed 

 that they must turn over to seize their prey, Willughby 

 and Eay explain that this is a provision of nature for 

 securing the safety of other fishes, and also for pre- 

 venting the sharks from perishing by their own greedi- 

 ness.^ In the same way De Geer admires the providential 

 instinct which causes scorpions to kill one another 

 whenever they meet, and so hinders these ''insectes 

 malfaisans" from becoming too numerous.^ Natural 

 theology, which undertakes to justify all the arrange- 

 ments of nature, finds it necessary to maintain that she 

 sometimes parries her own blows. 



Our authors think that the fish which swallowed 

 Jonah must have been a shark, not a whale, because (1) 

 the whale has a very contracted throat ; (2) whales are 

 very seldom seen in the Mediterranean ; and (3) the 

 fish in whose belly Hercules spent three days was, 

 according to Lycophron, a shark.^ 



THE HISTOKIA INSECTORUM, 1710 



The weakness of attempting too much appears more 

 strongly in Eay's History of Insects than in any other 

 of his writings. The indefatigable old man laboured to 

 the last to complete his gigantic task, which included an 

 ornithology, an ichthyology and a history of plants. It 

 was in his eyes a sacred duty to rescue from oblivion even 

 the scattered observations on insects made forty years 

 before by his friend and fellow-worker. These fragmen- 

 tary materials Ray supplemented by new observations of 

 no great moment, such as brief descriptions of caterpillars 

 (whose later stages were still undiscovered, and which 

 arc arranged only by the year of observation), or short 

 notes by Lister and Derham. Meanwhile the founda- 



' r. 45. "^Hiat. dea Iruectea, Vol. VII, p. 337. »P. 48. 



H 



