THE WINGS OF INSECTS. 205 



thousands of these minute gems are required to deck the wings 

 of a single butterfly. No monarch is more richly robed 

 than this mean little insect, which each summer brings forth in 

 millions ! 



Pursued by a thousand enemies, encompassed by a thousand 

 dangers, the insects must long since have perished, had not the 

 Beneficent Creator provided them with defences sufficient to 

 counterbalance the perils which continually menace their exist- 

 ence. Many, without being obliged to use the least exertion, 

 are protected by their colour or their form against numberless 

 attacks. The grey darkly-spotted Curculio nebulosus is so like 

 the soil upon which he is generally found, that he will de- 

 ceive even the searching eye of the entomologist; and the 

 Cassida viridis or common green tortoise-beetle, often seen 

 during the summer months in gardens on the leaves of mint, 

 is so like in colour to the herbs on which it lives, that, still fur- 

 ther protected by its usual immobility and flattened form, it 

 can hardly be distinguished from an excrescence of the plant. 



The wings of almost all the moths are mottled, and variegated 

 with dull colours, so that these hesperian or nocturnal insects 

 need not shelter themselves under cover, but securely repose 

 during the day in the crevices of the bark of trees, or on old 

 walls and palings; and being perfectly motionless, their colours 

 harmonise so exactly with these objects that they are over- 

 looked by their enemies. To cite but one example, the wings of 

 the English lappet-moth so ex- 

 actly resemble, both in shape and 

 colour, an arid brown leaf, as 

 to deceive the most inquisitive 

 eyes. 



Even the brightest of our but- 

 terflies are similarly protected. 

 The beautiful Van essse, the upper Lappet -moth. 



surface of whose wings is so richly illumined, are on the under- 

 side all black or brown, or striped with grey, so that it is difficult 

 to distinguish them from the ground or the trunks of trees, on 

 which they repose with folded wings. 



Several of the beetles belonging to the families of the Trogidse 

 and Curculionidse, by the spinelike protuberances and deep 

 sulcations of their wing-cases, resemble the dried hispid seeds 



