INSECTS FRAGILE AS FLOWERS. 145 



In the world of insects, examples of existence, bright and 

 brief and most precarious, are no less common, and in many 

 respects (especially as occurring amongst sensitive beings) in- 

 finitely more striking ; but, except with those sporters of a 

 day, hence called Ephemerae, the frail tenures of insect life 

 seldom serve to remind us of the like nature of our own, and 

 chiefly, perhaps, for the following reason. Many a brilliant 

 flutterer is cut off in the midst of its joyous activity, much 

 more suddenly than the flower over which we have seen it 

 hover, but ere the scattered petals of the one have strewed 

 the surface of the ground, the wings of the other have borne 

 it to die unseen within some hidden covert ; or, contributing 

 in death to the support of life, it may have sunk suddenly 

 into the devouring gulf of some insectivorous bird, or carni- 

 vorous feeder of its own race. 



It is, by the way, a remarkable dispensation of Nature's 

 Author, and one equally beautiful and kind, that while Death 

 is forever busy, as elsewhere, in the lower departments of the 

 animal kingdom, so few of the victims they afford him are 

 permitted to offend the eye in any shapes of disgust or danger. 

 To confine this observation merely to insects : We see the 

 air teeming with gnats ; the ground populous with ants and 

 beetles ; the fields, especially towards the end of summer, alive 

 with grasshoppers and Tipulidan flies ; the hedges, through the 

 months of June and July, scarcely more abundant in leaves 

 than in the smaller moths, which in daytime make a covert of 



