84 INSECTS. 



in proportion to its bulk, the strongest of created things a living 

 railway engine, or compared with which a railway engine is a 

 baby's toy. Insects are proverbially of small dimensions. Their 

 presence around us is only remarked as conferring additional life 

 and gaiety on the landscape, and except when by some inordinate 

 increase in their numbers they make up by their multitude for 

 their diminutive size, the ravages committed by them are trifling 

 and insignificant. Far otherwise would it be if they attained to 

 larger growth, and still possessed the extraordinary strength with 

 which they are now so conspicuously gifted : they would then 

 indeed become truly the tyrants of creation monsters such " as 

 fables never feigned nor fear conceived," fully adequate to exter- 

 minate from the surface of the earth all that it contains of vege- 

 table or of animal existence. A common flea or grasshopper will 

 spring two hundred ^times the length of its own body, which is as 

 though a man should at a single bound leap over the ball and cross 

 of St. Paul's cathedral. The dragon-fly possesses such indomi- 

 table strength of wing that, for a day together, it will sustain itself 

 in the air and fly with equal facility and swiftness backwards or 

 forwards, to the right or to the left, without turning. The beetles 

 are encased in a dense and hard integument impervious to ordi- 

 nary violence ; and we may add that the wasp and the termite 

 ant will penetrate the hardest wood with their jaws. Neither is 

 the velocity of the movements of insects inferior to their prodigious 

 muscular power. It has been calculated that in its ordinary flight 

 the common house-fly makes with its wings about six hundred 

 strokes in a second of time, which will carry it a distance of five 

 feet, but if alarmed .its velocity can be increased six or seven 

 times, or to thirty or thirty-five feet in a second. In this space of 

 time the swiftest race-horse that ever trod the turf could clear only 

 ninety feet, which is at the rate of more than a mile in a minute. 

 Compare the infinite difference in the size of the two animals (ten 

 millions of the fly would hardly counterpoise one racer), and how 

 wonderful will the velocity of the little insect 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 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 



