TRANSFORMATION OF INSECTS. 649 



contemplation. " We see," says an old author, " some of 

 these creatures crawl for a time as helpless worms upon 

 the earth, like ourselves ; they then retire into a covering, 

 which answers the end of a coffin or a sepulchre, wherein 

 they are invisibly transformed, and come forth in glorious 

 array, with wings and painted plumes, more like the inha- 

 bitants of the heavens than such worms as they were in 

 their former state. The transformation is so striking and 

 pleasant an emblem of the present, intermediate, and 

 glorified state of man, that people of the most remote 

 antiquity, when they buried their dead, embalmed and 

 enclosed them in an artificial covering, so figured and 

 painted as to resemble the caterpillar in the intermediate- 

 state ; and as Joseph was the first we read of that was 

 embalmed in Egypt, where this custom prevailed, it was 

 probably of Hebrew origin." 



Faint and imperfect symbol though it be, yet it may, 

 perchance, offer a glimpse of the metamorphosis awaiting 

 our own frail bodies. Between the highest and lowest 

 degree of corporeal and spiritual perfection, that there are 

 many intermediate degrees, the result of which is one 

 universal chain of being, no one can for a moment gain- 

 gay. Thus the angel Raphael is made to say, in Milton's- 

 Paradise Lost, 



1 What surmounts the reach 



Of human sense, I shall delineate so, 



By likening spiritual to corporeal forms, 



As may express them best : though what if earth 



Be 'but the shadow of heaven, and things therein 



Each to other like, more than on earth is thought 1 " 



The great class of insects, which furnishes four- fifths of 

 the existing species of the animal kingdom, has two chief 

 divisions. In the one, the Ametabola, we have an imper- 

 fect, in the other, the Metabola, a perfect metamorphosis ;. 

 that is, in the former there is no quiescent pupa state, and 

 the metamorphosis is accompanied by no striking change 

 of form ; in the latter, there is an inactive pupa that takes 

 no nourishment, and so great a change of form, that only 

 by watching the progress of the metamorphosis can we 

 recognise the pupa and the imago as belonging to the 

 same animal 



The degree of metamorphosis is, however, very different 



