EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF INSECTS. 349 



peated and scarcely credible instances, which in every 

 rightly constituted mind are calculated to excite, in an 

 extraordinary degree, those sensations of reverence and 

 love for the Invisible Author of these wonders, and 

 that faith and trust in his Power and Providence, which 

 an attentive survey of the works of Creation has a natu- 

 ral tendency to produce. And you will not only be 

 struck by this circumstance, but equally by the infinite 

 variations in the structure that will present themselves to 

 your notice ; and that not sudden and per saltus, but by 

 approaches made in the most gradual manner from one 

 form to another. And all along, where the uses of any 

 particular organ or part have been ascertained, if you 

 consider its structure with due attention, you will find in 

 it the nicest adaptation of means to an end : a circum- 

 stance this, which proves most triumphantly, that the 

 Power who hnmediately gave being to all the animal 

 forms, was neither a blind unconscious power, resulting 

 from a certain order of things, as some philosophists love 

 to speak a ; nor a formative appetency in the animals 

 themselves, produced by their wants, habits, and local 

 circumstances, and giving birth, in the lapse of ages, to 

 all the animal forms that now people our globe b ; but a 

 Power altogether distinct from and above nature, and its 

 Almighty Author . 



a Lamarck Hist. Nat. des Anim. sans Vertcbr. i. 311, 214. 



b Ibid. 162. Compare the Systcme des Anim. sans Vertebr. of the 

 same author, p. 12 — . 



c The doctrine of Epicurus — that the Deity concerns not himself 

 with the affairs of the world or its inhabitants, which, as Cicero has 

 judiciously observed (De Nat. Deor. 1. 1. ad calcem), while it ac- 

 knowledges a God in ivords, denies him in reality ; has furnished 

 the original stock upon which most of these bitter fruits of modern 



