32 METAMORPHOSES. 



caterpillar isfoccupied by a capacious stomach. In the butterfly it has 

 become converted into an almost imperceptible thread-like viscus ; and the 

 abdomen is now filled by two large packets of eggs, or other organs not 

 visible in the first state. In the former, two spirally-convoluted tubes 

 were filled with a silky gum ; in the latter, both tubes and silk have almost 

 totally vanished ; and changes equally great have taken place in the economy 

 and structure of the nerves and other organs. 



What a surprising transformation ! Nor was this all. The change from 

 one form to the other was not direct. An intermediate state not less 

 singular intervened. After casting its skin even to its very jaws several 

 times, and attaining its full growth, the caterpillar attached itself to a leaf 

 by a silken girth. Its body greatly contracted : its skin once more split 

 asunder, and disclosed an oviform mass, without exterior mouth, eyes, or 

 limbs, and exhibiting no other symptom of life than a slight motion when 

 touched. In this state of death-like torpor, and without tasting food, the 

 insect existed for several months, until at length the tomb burst, and out 

 of a case not more than an inch long, and a quarter of an inch in diameter, 

 proceeded the butterfly before you, which covers a surface of nearly four 

 inches square. 



Almost every insect which you see has undergone a transformation as 

 singular and surprising, though varied in many of its circumstances. That 

 active little fly, now an unbidden guest at your table *, whose delicate palate 

 selects your choicest viands, one while extending his proboscis to the 

 margin of a drop of wine, and then gaily flying to take a more solid repast 

 from a pear or a peach; now gamboling with his comrades in the air, now 

 gracefully currying his furled wings with his taper feet, was but the other 

 day a disgusting grub, without wings, without legs, without eyes, wallowing, 

 well pleased, in the midst of a mass of excrement. 



The "grey-coated gnat," whose humming salutation, while she makes 

 her airy circles about your bed, gives terrific warning of the sanguinary 

 operation in which she is ready to engage, was a few hours ago the inha- 

 bitant of a stagnant pool, more in shape like a fish than an insect. Then 

 to have been taken out of the water would have been speedily fatal ; now 

 it could as little exist in any other element than air. Then it breathed 

 through its tail ; now through openings in its sides. Its shapeless head, 

 in that period of its existence, is now exchanged for one adorned with 

 elegantly tufted antennae, and furnished, instead of jaws, with an apparatus 

 more artfully constructed than the cupping-glasses of the phlebotomist 

 an apparatus, which, at the same time that it strikes in the lancets, com- 

 poses a tube for pumping up the flowing blood. 



The "shard-born beetle," whose "sullen horn," as he directs his 

 " droning flight " close past your ears in your evening walk, calling up in 

 poetic association the lines in which he has been alluded to by Shakspeare, 

 Collins, and Gray, was not in his infancy an inhabitant of air, the first 

 period of his life being spent in gloomy solitude, as a grub, under the 

 surface of the earth. The shapeless maggot, which you scarcely fail to 

 meet with in some one of every handful of nuts you crack, would not 

 always have grovelled in that humble state. If your unlucky intrusion 

 upon its vaulted dwelling had not left it to perish in the wide world, it 



1 "Ccenis etiam non vocatus ut Musca advolo." Aristophon in Pythagonsta 

 apud Athenaeum. (Mouffet, 56.) 



