JUNE. 



115 



penetrate with their jaws the hardest wood. Neither 

 is the velocity of the movements of insects inferior to 

 their prodigious muscular power. " An anonymous 

 writer in Nicholson's Journal," say Kirby and Spence, 

 "calculates that in its ordinary flight the common 

 house-fly (Musca domesticd) makes with its wings 

 about six hundred strokes, which carry it five feet 

 every second ; but if alarmed, he states their velocity 

 can be increased six or seven fold, or to thirty or thirty- 

 five feet in the same period. In this space of time a 

 race-horse could clear only ninety feet, which is at the 

 rate of more than a mile in a minute. Our little fly, 

 in her swiftest flight, will in the same space of time go^ 

 more than the third of a mile. Now, compare the 

 infinite difference of the size of the two animals (ten 

 millions of the fly would hardly counterpoise one racer), 

 and how wonderful will the velocity of this minute 

 creature appear ! Did the fly equal the race-horse in 

 size, and retain its present powers in the ratio of its 

 magnitude, it would traverse the globe with the rapidity 

 of lightning."* 



Let the reader, therefore, imagine for an instant that 

 great law of nature, which restricts the dimensions of 

 an insect within certain bounds, dispensed with even in 

 a single species. Suppose the wasp or the stag-beetle 

 dilated to the bulk of a tiger or of an elephant cased 

 in impenetrable armour furnished with jaws that 

 would crush the solid trunk of an oak winged, and 

 capable of flight so rapid as to render escape ho,pe- 



* Kirby and Spence, Op. Cit. vol. ii. p. 358. 



