144 INSECT EMBLEMS. 



denote both a Butterfly and the human Soul; hence (say the 

 learned) the Egyptian fable of Cupid and Psyche, and the 

 reason that in Grecian sculptures Psyche is so often represented 

 as subject to Cupid, either under the form of a butterfly or 

 adorned with the wings of that most glorious of insect flut- 

 terers. 



When life and immortality were brought to light by the 

 Gospel, the insect type by which, in the midst of Pagan 

 obscurity, they had been dimly shadowed forth, acquired fresh 

 illumination. Employed by the Fathers of the Church, the 

 beautiful symbol of the Butterfly shone on their ponderous 

 pages like a beam of sun-light, falling through a painted 

 window on the gloom of a cloister. So great, indeed, was the 

 value attached to this insect emblem by writers for the Church, 

 in the time of Reaumur, that they absolutely fought for it 

 with that great and good naturalist, because, with his newly- 

 acquired light on its natural history, he saw reason to dispute 

 the entire fitness of insect transformation to represent the 

 mystery of human resurrection. And certainly, when it came 

 to be ascertained, by the experiments of Reaumur and others, 

 that a caterpillar is not in fact a simple but a compound 

 animal, containing within it the rudiments of the future 

 butterfly in all its parts, it ceased to be an exact parallel of 

 the usual idea of the resurrection. 



Although the Butterfly seems to have been the first, if 

 not the only insect noticed by the ancients as representative 

 of the immortal principle, there are a multitude of others which 

 furnish emblems quite as fitting of the soul's destination to a 

 higher sphere. 



The fly, now regaling upon sweets, or buzzing in the 

 summer sun, has come out from a shape, and most likely from 

 a substance, of disgust. The beetle, now careering it through 

 the summer evening sky, has emerged from the form of an 

 unsightly grub, and from a living burial within the earth. 

 And the gnat, now a graceful arid agile sporter in the air, has 



