INSECT LIGHTS HARMLESS. 175 



veritable Jack o' Lantern the ignis fatuus of the benighted 

 traveller. But of this curious insect we have already narrated 

 facts and told a tale. 



The harmless quality of all these insect lights is a kind 

 provision of nature, no less adapted than a variety of others 

 to attract our admiring notice. 



Truly, it is a thing wonderful and beautiful, to find in 

 animated forms a substance so nearly resembling that formi- 

 dable element, fire ; one possessed of its power to diffuse light, 

 yet wholly destitute of its dangerous properties. Had it been 

 otherwise, only imagine the direful results. Earth would 

 have been the scene of perpetual conflagrations, and its in- 

 habitants for ever on the watch to extinguish or guard against 

 the mischief of living sparks. A few tribes of fiery insects 

 would have sufficed to change the entire face of nature and 

 the superstructures of man. 



Where, in America, would have been the forests ? Con- 

 sumed, perhaps before worthy of the name, or cleared by the 

 fire-fly, before the settler's axe. And where the settler him- 

 self, with his log-habitation ? 



In Asia, wooden temples and pagodas might not have been ; 

 or scarce one would have escaped destruction, lit up almost as 

 often by the lantern-fly without, as by the paper lanterns 

 within ; while in Europe, even in our native isle, barns would 

 have blazed, and corn and hay-stacks have been nightly fired, 

 and the lurking incendiaries, which no police could have de- 



