294 PLANTS AND INSECTS. 



departments of the reign of nature. In external form, hues, 

 and clothing, there is quite sufficient of general likeness betwixt 

 plants and insects to stamp them as productions of the same 

 designing mind and matchless skill. In clothing, wool, hair, 

 spines, and scales, are common to both. Flowers alone emulate 

 the colours of the more splendid butterflies and beetles. The 

 delicate veined leaflet or petal are prevailing similitudes of 

 form drawn yet closer in the papilionaceous tribe ; the purple 

 pea-flower and yellow broom telling us, in poetic person- 

 ality, 



" The butterfly all green and gold 



To me hath often flown, 

 Here in my blossoms to behold 

 Wings lovely as his own." Wordsworth. 



A general analogy of internal structure is well known to 

 prevail throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms ; but 

 of this correspondence there is perhaps no particular instance 

 so close and striking as that which has been noticed between 

 the origin and development of lepidopterous insects (moths 

 and butterflies) and those of perfect plants. The egg and the 

 seed the caterpillar and the bud the expanded insect and 

 the expanded flower are correspondences not fanciful but 

 existent ; and, as a flower in its rudiments can be discerned 

 within the bud, where, protected by successive leaf-scales, it 

 sometimes remains throughout the winter,* so the future 

 butterfly lies enfolded within the numerous successive skins of 



* As in buds of the pear-tree and laburnum. See experiments of Grew and Du 

 Hamel, quoted in " Insect Transformations," p. 136. 



