MOTIONS OF - INSECTS. 369 
less took their name of hawk-moths. When they unfold 
their long tongue, and wipe its sweets from any nectari- 
ferous flower, they always keep upon the wing, sus- 
pending themselves over it till they have exhausted them, 
when they fly away to another. The species called by 
collectors the humming-bird (S. Stellatarum, L.), and 
by some persons mistaken for a real one, is remarkable 
for this, and the motion of its wings is inconceivably 
rapid *. 
The gyrations of insects take place either when they 
are reposing, or when they are flying or swimming.— 
I was once much diverted by observing the actions of a 
minute moth (7Z?nea) upon a leaf on which it was sta- 
tioned. Making its head the centre of its revolutions, 
it turned round and round with considerable rapidity, 
as if it had the vertigo, for some time. I did not, how- 
ever, succeed in my attempts to take it.—Scaliger no- 
ticed a similar motion in the book-crab (Chelifer can- 
croides), 
Reaumur describes in a very interesting and lively 
way the gyrations of the Ephemera before noticed‘, 
round a lighted flambeau. It is singular, says he, that 
moths which fly only in the night, and shun the day, 
should be precisely those that come to seek the light in 
our apartments. It is still more extraordinary that these 
Ephemerze—which appearing after sun-set, and dying 
before sun-rise, are destined never to behold the light of 
that orb—should have so strong an inclination for any 
luminous object. To hold a flambeau when they ap- 
4 Rai. Hist. Ins. 133. 1. > Lesser, L. i. 248, note 22. 
¢ Vor. I. 4th Kd. 282—. 
VOL, IT. 2B 
