342 NATURAL ARRANGEMENT OF INSECTS. 



sures every thing with direct reference to himself; and 

 as it promotes his good or ill, so does he pronounce 

 upon its worth or worthlessness. We admire the eco- 

 nomy of the bees, and speak with rapture of the indus- 

 try of the little chemists which gather those stores of 

 the fields, that, hut for them, would evade our acquisi- 

 tion, and we then fraudulently rob them of their hard- 

 earned treasures ; but we execrate the devastations of 

 the Termes, although it is the self-same impulse which 

 directs the energies of each. Man, in his tyranny aver 

 Nature and Nature's free denizens, forgets the justice 

 of the retribution, and exclaims against it as an evil, 

 heedless of the multitudinous evils which his own pra- 

 vity scatters around, and which frequently have no ob- 

 ject beyond their wilfulness. But he must here submit, 

 and with patience suffer what his sagacity can rarely 

 avoid ; and to prompt this, he must see in it but another 

 .instance of that general law which imbues all creatures 

 with the instinct of self-preservation and the ardent love 

 and protection of their young, that universal crropyj) 

 which overcomes all obstacles, and is resistless in its 

 effects. These insects form very large communities, 

 consisting of individuals of four different kinds of 

 winged males and females, and of soldiers and neuters 

 which are apterous. In the former, the four wings are 

 equal, with the neuration of the disk obsolete, a charac- 

 ter not found elsewhere among the Neuroptera; and the 

 apterous individuals have strong mandibles. There is 

 some diversity of opinion respecting the latter; and na- 

 turalists are not decided whether they are the prelimi- 

 nary stages of the insect, or independent and perfect 

 states of existence : they, however, constitute the major 

 part of the community, and execute all its labours. The 

 information that we possess upon their internal economy 

 is very imperfect. All that we know as certain is, that 

 the different species construct different nests made of a 

 kind of hard mortar; consisting of earth or sand agglu- 

 tinated together, some of which are like a cluster of 

 sugar-loaves of different sizes, the largest being eight 



