MEANS OF DEFENCE OF INSECTS. Doll 
aw 
fountain on the top of a mountain, near Leuk in the Va- 
lais in Switzerland, in which the thermometer stood at 
205°, transparent larvee, probably of gnats, or some such 
insect.—Lord Bute also, in a letter to my late revered 
friend, the Rey. William Jones of Nayland, imparts a 
similar observation made by His Lordship at the baths 
of Abano, near the Euganian mountains, on the borders 
of the Paduan states. ‘They are strong, sulphureous, 
boiling springs, oozing out of a rocky eminence in great 
numbers, and spreading over an acre of the top of a 
gentle hill. In the midst of these boiling springs, within 
three feet of five or six of them, rises a tepid one about 
blood warm. But the most extraordinary circumstance 
which he relates is, that not only confervas were found 
in the boiling springs, but numbers of small black beetles, 
that died upon being taken out and plunged into cold 
water ?.—And once, having taken in the hot dung of my 
cucumber-bed a small beetle (Lyctus Juglandis, ¥'.), I im- 
mersed it in boiling water; and after keeping it sub- 
merged a sufficient time, as I thought, to destroy it, upon 
taking it out, and laying it to dry, it soon began to move 
and walk. Its native station being of so high a tempe- 
rature, Providence has fitted it for it, by giving it extra- 
ordinary powers of sustaining heat. Other insects are 
as remarkable for bearing any degree of cold. Some 
gnats that De Geer observed, survived after the water 
in which they were was frozen into a mass of ice: and : 
Reaumur relates many similar instances”. 
The last passive means of defence that I mentioned, 
a J, Mason Good’s Anniversary Oration, delivered March 8, 1808, 
before the Medical Society of London, p. 31. 
> De Geer, vi. 355; comp. 320, and Reaum. it. 141-147. 
