INSECT TRANSFORMATIONS. 



that they were poisonous ; and many were in conse- 

 quence afraid to touch soups or salads. Reaumur 

 thought it incumbent on him to refute this notion at 

 some length ; but we cannot accept his doctrine as 

 very palatable, when he tells us that few dishes of soup 

 or salad are ever prepared without containing cater- 

 pillars, and yet all the world are not poisoned there- 

 by, any more than by eating oysters or viper broth. 

 He endeavoured also to account by calculation for 

 their excess, from the data of the female moth lay- 

 ing about four hundred eggs. Now, if there were 

 only twenty caterpillars distributed in a garden, and 

 all lived through the winter, and became moths in 

 the succeeding May, the eggs laid by these, if all fer- 

 tile, would produce 800,000, a number much more 

 than sufficient to effect great destruction.* Did not 

 Providence, therefore put causes in operation to keep 



Transformations of the y muih (Phisin Gamir>n). , the r<r;r, featly 

 magnified, on a morsel of laf. Z>, the er on n lea* 1 , i mural size, r, the 

 larva. <?, the pupa, e, the moth. 



* Rv'amnur, ii, 327. 



