NATURAL THEOLOGY. 115 



quire, or as different situations may afford for them 

 room and food. Where this vast fecundity meets 

 with a vacancy fitted to receive the species, there 

 it operates with its whole effect ; there it pours in 

 its numbers and replenishes the waste. We com- 

 plain of what we call the exorbitant multiplica- 

 tion of some troublesome insects ; not reflecting, 

 that large portions of nature might be left void 

 without it. If the accounts of travellers may be 

 depended upon, immense tracts of forests in North 

 America would be nearly lost to sensitive exist- 

 ence, if it were not for gnats. " In the thinly in- 

 habited regions of America, in which the waters 

 stagnate and the climate is warm, the whole air is 

 filled with crowds of these insects." Thus it is, 

 that where we looked for solitude and death-like 

 silence, we meet with animation, activity, enjoy- 

 ment ; with a busy, a happy, and a peopled world. 

 Again ; hosts of mice are reckoned amongst the 

 plagues of the north-east part of Europe ; whereas 

 vast plains in Siberia, as we learn from good au- 

 thority, would be lifeless without them. The 

 Caspian deserts are converted by their presence 

 into crowds of warrens. Between the Volga and 

 the Yaik, and in the country of Hyrcania, the 

 ground, says Pallas, is in many places covered 

 with little hills, raised by the earth cast out in 

 forming the burrows. Do we so envy these bliss 

 ful abodes, as to pronounce the fecundity by 

 which they are supplied with inhabitants to be an 

 evil ; a subject of complaint, and not of praise ? 



