METAMORPHOSES. 73 



pupa.^ A caterpillar, then, may be regarded as a locomotive egg, having 

 for its embryo the included butterfly, which after a certain period assimi- 

 lates to itself the animal substances by which it is surrounded ; has its 

 organs gradually developed ; and at length breaks through the shell 

 which encloses it. 



This explanation strips the subject of every thing miraculous, yet by 

 no means reduces it to a simple or uninteresting operation. Our reason is 

 confounded at the reflection that a larva, at first not thicker than a thread, 

 includes the germs of its own triple, or sometimes octuple, teguments ; 

 the case of a chrysalis, and of a butterfly, all curiously folded in each 

 other; with an apparatus of vessels for breathing and digesting, of nerves 

 for sensation, and of muscles for moving ; and that these various forms of 

 existence will undergo their successive evolutions, by aid of a few leaves 

 received into its stomach. And still less able are we to comprehend how 

 this organ should at one time be capable of digesting leaves, at another only 

 honey; how one while a silky fluid should be secreted, at another none; 

 or how organs at one period essential to the existence of the insect should 

 at another be cast off, and the whole system which supported them 

 vanish.^ 



Nor does this explanation, though it precludes the idea of that resem- 

 blance, in every particular, which, at one time, was thought to obtain 

 between the metamorphosis of insects, especially of the Le])idoptera ovder, 

 and the resurrection of the body, do away that general analogy which 

 cannot fail to strike every one who at all considers the subject. Even 

 Swammerdam, whose observations have proved that the analogy is not so 

 complete as had been imagined, speaking of the metamorphosis of insects, 

 uses these strong words : " This process is formed in so remarkable a 

 manner in butterflies, that we see therein the resurrection painted before 

 our eyes, and exemplified so as to be examined by our hands."*' To see, 

 indeed, a caterpillar crawling upon the earth sustained by the most ordi- 

 nary kinds of food, which, when it has existed a few weeks or months 

 under this humble form, its appointed work being finished, passes into an 

 intermediate state of seeming death, when it is wound up in a kind of 

 shroud and encased in a coffin, and is most commonly buried under the 

 earth, (though sometimes its sepulchre is in the water, and at others in 

 various substances in the air,) and after this creature and others of its 

 tribe have remained their destined time in this death-like state, to behold 

 earth, air, and water give up their several prisoners : to survey them, when, 

 called by the warmth of the solar beam, they burst from their sepulchres, 

 cast off their cerements, from this state of torpid inactivity, come forth, 

 as a bride out of her chamber — to survey them, I say, arrayed in their 

 nuptial glory, prepared to enjoy a new and more exalted condition of life, 

 in which all their powers are developed, and they are arrived at the per- 

 fection of their nature ; when no longer confined to the earth they can 



» Reaum. i. 359. 



* Dr. Herold {Entwickelungs geschichte der Schmetterlinge), and other modern physiologists, 

 deny that the germs of the skins of the caterpillar and chrysalis and of the future 

 butterfly exist in the young caterpillar; but, for reasons assigned in detail in another 

 place (vol. iii. edit. 5. pp. 52—62.). the theory of Swammerdam and Bonnet, as above ex- 

 plaiiied, is here preferred. 



3 HUl's Swamm. i. 127. a. 



