60 METAMORPHOSES- 



miracles, which, though scarcely surpassed in sin- 

 gularity by all that poets have feigned, and though ac- 

 tually wrought every day beneath our eyes, are, because 

 of their commonness, and the minuteness of the objects, 

 unheeded alike by the ignorant and the learned. 



That butterfly which amuses you with its aerial ex- 

 cursions, one while extracting nectar from the tube of 

 the honeysuckle, and then, the very image of fickleness, 

 flying to a rose as if to contrast the hue of its wings with 

 that of the flower on which it reposes — did not come 

 into the world as you now behold it. At its first exclu- 

 sion from the egg, and for some months of its existence 

 afterwards, it was a w T orm-like caterpillar, crawling upon 

 sixteen short legs, greedily devouring leaves with two 

 jaws, and seeing by means of twelve eyes so minute as 

 to be nearly imperceptible without the aid of a micro^ 

 scope. You now view it furnished with wings capable 

 of rapid and extensive flights : of its sixteen feet ten 

 have disappeared, and the remaining six are in most re- 

 spects wholly unlike those to which they have succeeded; 

 its jaws have vanished, and are replaced by a curled-up 

 proboscis suited only for sipping liquid sweets ; the form 

 of its head is entirely changed, — two long horns project 

 from its upper surface ; and, instead of twelve invisible 

 eyes, you behold two, very large, and composed of at 

 least twenty thousand convex lenses, each supposed to 

 be a distinct and effective eye ! 



Were you to push your examination further, and by 

 dissection to compare the internal conformation of the 

 caterpillar with that of the butterfly, you would witness 

 changes even more extraordinary. In the former you 

 would find some thousands of muscles, which in the fat,- 



