270 INSECT DEVELOPMENT. 



If, leaving the vegetable world, we were to mount upwards 

 in the scale of animated being, we should find amongst fish, 

 reptiles, birds, and quadrupeds, a variety of similar instances, 

 wherein, by resemblance or analogy, by dependence, or as 

 mutually representative, these all stand connected with objects 

 in the insect kingdom. We may, from time to time, notice 

 some of these relations incidentally; but to pass over, now, 

 the intermediate orders of creation, let us see whether lordly 

 man, as well as the lowly plant, has not his analogies, at least 

 symbolic, with the insect he despises. 



The mind of man, as it exists in infancy, has been aptly 

 likened to the seed of a plant considered as possessing, in 

 miniature, the trunk, branches, leaves, and fruit of the future 

 tree ; and, agreeably to such a notion, it has been observed that 

 the highest degree of cultivation, of which it is capable, consists 

 in the perfect development of that peculiar organization which 

 as really exists in infancy as in mature years. 



Having noted already the analogy of insect development, 

 from the egg up to the winged estate, with that of a vegetable, 

 from the seed up to the flower and fruit it scarcely needs, 

 the above admitted, to remark that the human mind finds its 

 natural parallel (only one yet more striking) in the insect as 

 well as in the vegetable world. 



In the shapes also of good or evil, which the expanding 

 mind assumes, we shall still find, in insect forms and their 

 marked characteristics, similitudes if not more apt, at least 

 more easily observed, than those presented by larger tribes. 

 In proportion as, diverging by perversity of free will from 

 our divine type and pattern, we resemble or make ourselves 

 the moral counterparts of the tiger, the fox, the hawk, the 

 serpent, we are of course as justly symbolized by those insects 

 which have been observed to concentrate in their pigmy forms 

 the very essence of the same instinctive dispositions, such as 

 the cruel Mantis, the fierce predatory beetles, the wily ant-lion, 

 the treacherous and cruel spider. 



