20 NATURAL HISTORY OF WASPS. 
only attainable by a different arrangement of more 
varied materials. 
The life of an insect has often served to point a 
moral as to our own ‘present and future state, the 
grovelling worm—the pupa in its death-like sleep— 
and the perfect insect rising in all its new beauty 
from the grave, have been fancifully said to typify the 
successive stages through which our own being is des- 
tined to pass. But the illustration is neither as accu- 
rate nor as beautiful as that which St. Paul* adopts. 
For, though insects may be said to be perfect, as 
insects, each with their one idea, and for their one 
purpose, yet the imago should be called rather a 
changed than a perfected being. It has new faculties 
indeed, and a wider range, but it has often a less 
intimate relation with the world at large; and it 
often plays a less useful part in its winged form 
than it did as a grovellmg worm. And in many— 
most insects—the shorter existence of the imago, 
compared with that of the larva, sadly. mars the 
point of this illustration as a type of eternity. 
The real analogies of insect life are to be read in 
quite a different way. Professor Owenf has put 
this very happily :—‘“If the different stages in the 
development of man were not hidden in the dark 
recesses of the womb, but: were manifested, as in 
insects, by premature birth and the enjoyment of 
active life, with a limitation of the developmental 
force to mere growth; if the progress of develop- 
ment was thus interrupted and completed at brief 
and remote periods, with great rapidity, and during 
* 1 Cor. xv, 37. 
+ ‘Lectures on the Invertebrate Animals,’ p. 248. 
