112 CONTENT. 



elaborated. Vegetables fashion elementary or mine- 

 ral matter ; and when fashioned those matters pass 

 ready formed into the bodies of animals ; — animals 

 change one portion of them, and store up another in 

 their tissues : — they engender heat, and elicit force 

 in consuming that which vegetables have produced and 

 slowly accumulated. This is the relation between 

 the luminous insect, and the soil charged with phos- 

 phates. What the plant reduces, the insect appro- 

 priates and consumes ; — plants decompose carbonic 

 acid to seize upon its carbon, and they decompose 

 water to seize upon its hydrogen ; animals burn car- 

 bon to form carbonic acid, and they act on hydrogen 

 to form water. The Fire-fly, in its economy of life, 

 burns the phosphorus, absorbed from the plants that 

 nourished it, to give forth light. The phosphorus in 

 a state of combustion unites with the oxygen of the 

 air, and when we experimentalise this process of com- 

 bustion, in order to trace the parts severally played 

 by vegetables and by animals in the economy of 

 nature, we find that phosphorus, when it unites with 

 the oxygen of the air, produces a solid acid, which 

 falls down in the included air like flakes of snow, and 

 in this way it again combines with the soil. 



" It is certain that the Fire-fly feeds upon the 

 sugar-cane ; and should the larva do so likewise, as it 

 is xyloipliagous, this insect must be added to those 

 that do mischief to the planter ; considering the 

 abundant swarms which nightly, at certain seasons, 

 illuminate the cane-fields. When Mr. Lees, from 

 the Bahamas, carried the living Fire-fl}' to England, 

 he took sugar-canes to sea with him, on which the 



