BURROWING INSECTS. 141 



an inhabitant of the air; yet its life has not altogether been spent 

 in amusing itself, for it has passed an existence of some three 

 years or more hidden from human gaze. 



To-day it is a bright denizen of the sunbeams, exulting in its 

 beauty, and dancing in very rapture in the air; yesterday, it 

 was a denizen of the mud, a slimy, crawling, repulsive creature, 

 breathing through the medium of the water, and feeding greedily 

 upon any prey that might come within its reach. Yesterday, 

 had it been removed from the water and laid in the sunbeams, it 

 would have died as with poison, and in an hour would have been 

 reduced to a dry and withered semblance of its former self; to- 

 day, were it to be plunged beneath the waters, it would quickly 

 perish, and be shortly eaten by its former companions. For it is 

 fitted for a higher position and a purer atmosphere, so that the 

 element which but a few hours ago was its very life, has now 

 become a present death, and the food in which it so lately revel- 

 ed can no longer be received into that etherealized form. 



So is it with many other insects. Some of our most tender 

 and downy-plumed moths, whose exquisitely delicate raiment is 

 destroyed by a touch, have entered upon their winged state while 

 in the bowels of the earth, and have made their way through the 

 soil without losing a single feather of the myriad plumes with 

 which their bodies and wings are covered. Flies, too, whose 

 slender bodies and light gauzy wings always excite our wonder, 

 that a thing so light should contend with the world, have passed 

 the greater part of their lives in some dark hole, where the fresh 

 air never entered, and into which the sunbeams never cast a ray. 



"Were this work to be arranged according to the rigid systems 

 of zoological schoolmen, the list of burrowing insects must have 

 been headed by the beetles ; but, as the subject of the book is to 

 describe the peculiar dwellings which are needful for the welfare 

 of various animals, a different arrangement is necessary, so that a 

 well-built home takes precedence over a well-developed animal. 

 If we wish to select an order of insects which surpasses every 

 other in the variety and excellence of their burrows, we turn at 

 once to the Hymenoptera, a large and important group of insects, 

 which includes the wasps, bees, ants, saw-flies, ichneumons, and 

 one or two other families. The greater number of these insects 

 burrow in the ground ; but others are remarkable for their won- 

 derful powers of excavating the hardest wood, and of forming 



