68 METAMORPHOSES. 



you would witness changes even more extraordinary. In the former you 

 would find some thousands of muscles, which in the latter are replaced by 

 others of a form and structure entirely different. Nearly the whole body 

 of the caterpillar is occupied by a capacious stomach. In the butterfly 

 this has become converted into an almost imperceptible thread-like viscus ; 

 and the abdomen is now filled by two large packets of eggs, or other 

 organs not visible in the first state. In the former, two spirally-convoluted 

 tubes were filled with a silky gum ; in the latter, both tubes and silk have 

 almost totally vanished ; and changes equally great have taken place in 

 the economy and structure of the nerves and other organs. 



What a surprising transformation ! Nor was this all. The change 

 from one form to the other was not direct. An intermediate state not 

 less singular intervened. After casting its skin even to its very jaws 

 several times, and attaining its full growth, the caterpillar attached itself 

 to a leaf by a silken girth. Its body greatly contracted : its skin once 

 more split asunder, and disclosed an oviform mass, without exterior mouth, 

 eyes, or limbs, and exhibiting no other symptom of life than a slight 

 motion when touched. In this state of deatli-like torpor, and without 

 tasting food, the insect existed for several months, until at length the tomb 

 burst, and out of a case not more than an inch long, and a quarter of an 

 inch in diameter, proceeded the butterfly before you, which covers a 

 surface of nearly four inches square. 



Almost every insect which you see has undergone a transformation as 

 singular and surprising, though varied in many of its circumstances. That 

 active little fly, now an unbidden guest at your table^, whose delicate 

 palate selects your choicest viands, one while extending his proboscis to 

 the margin of a drop of wine, and then gaily flying to take a more solid 

 repast from a pear or a peach ; now gamboling with his comrades in the 

 air, now gracefully currying his furled wings with his taper feet, was but 

 the other day a disgusting grub, without wings, without legs, without eyes, 

 wallowing, well pleased, in the midst of a mass of excrement. 



The " grey-coated gnat," whose hunmiing salutation, while she makes 

 her airy circles about your bed, gives terrific warning of the sanguinary 

 operation in which she is ready to engage, was a few hours ago the inhabi- 

 tant of a stagnant pool, more in shape like a fish than an insect. ' Then 

 to have been taken out of the water would have been speedily fatal ; now 

 it could as little exist in any other element than air. Then it breathed 

 through its tail ; now through openings in its sides. Its shapeless head, 

 in that period of its existence, is now exchanged for one adorned with 

 elegantly tufted antennae, and furnished, instead of jaws, with an apparatus 

 more artfully constructed than the cupping-glasses of the phlebotomist — 

 an apparatus, which, at the same time that it strikes in the lancets, com- 

 poses a tube for pumping up the flowing blood. 



The "shard-born beetle," whose "sullen horn," as he directs his 

 " droning flight " close past your ears in your evening walk, calling up in 

 poetic association the lines in which he has been alluded to by Shakspere, 

 Collins, and Gray, was not in his infancy an inhabitant of air ; the first 

 period of his life being spent in gloomy solitude, as a grub, under the sur- 



• "Coenis eliam non vocatus ut Musca advolo.'' Aristophon in Fythagoriata apud 

 Athenaeum. (Mouflet, 56.) 



