78 PHYSIOLOGY OF LIFE. 



the lightning -like rapidity with which the insect tribes 

 devour and eliminate their food, as by an instinctive ne- 

 cessity, and in the least degree for the purposes of the 

 animal's own growth or enlargement. The same pre- 

 dominance of irritability, and at the same time a new start 

 in individuation, is shown in the reproductive power as 

 generation. There is now a regular projection, ab intra 

 ad extra, for which neither sprouts nor cuttings can any 

 longer be the substitutes. We have not space for further 

 detail ; but there is one point too strikingly illustrative 

 and even confirmative of the proposed system, to be omitted 

 altogether. We mean the curious fact, that the same 

 characteristic tendency, ad extra, which in the males and 

 females of certain insect tribes is realized in the functions 

 of generation, conception, and parturiency, manifests and 

 expands itself in the sexless individuals (which are always 

 in this case the great majority of the species), as instincts 

 of art, and in the construction of works completely de- 

 tached and inorganic ; while the geometric regularity of 

 these works, which bears an analogy to crystallization, is 

 demonstrably no more than the necessary result of uniform 

 action in a compressed multitude. 



Again, as the insect world, averaging the whole, comes 

 nearest to plants, (whose very essence is reproduction,) 

 in the multitude of their germs; so does it resemble 

 plants in the sufficiency of a single impregnation for the 

 evolution of myriads of detached lives, Even so, the meta- 

 morphoses of insects, from the egg to the maggot and 

 caterpillar, and from these, through the nympha and 

 aurelia into the perfect insect, are but a more individuated 

 and intenser form of a similar transformation of the plant 



