INSECTA 251 



are trifling and insignificant. Far otherwise, however, would it be, 

 if they attained to larger growth, and still possessed the extra- 

 ordinary power with which they are now so conspicuously gifted ; 

 they would then, indeed, become truly the tyrants of the creation, 

 monsters such " as fables never feigned or fear conceived," fully 

 adequate to destroy and exterminate from the surface of the earth 

 all that it contains of vegetable or of animal life. 



We have already seen that the flea or the grasshopper will 

 spring two hundred times the length of its own body ; that the 

 dragon-fly possesses such indomitable 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 ; that the beetles are encased in a 

 dense and hard integument, impervious to ordinary violence ; and 

 we might add, that the wasp and the termite ant will 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, u calculates that in its ordinary flight the common house- 

 fly (Musca domestica) 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 crea- 

 ture 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 hopeless ; what would resist 

 such destroyers, or how could the world support their ravages ? 



* Kirby and Spence, op. cit. vol.ii. p. 358. 



