METAMORPHOSES. 69 



physiological discoveries, the conversion of a caterpillar 

 into a butterfly, must have been a fact sufficient to put to 

 a nonplus all the sceptical oppugners of such transforma- 

 tions. And, however we may smile in this enlightened 

 age at the inference drawn not two centuries ago by Sir 

 Theodore Mayerne, the editor of Mouffet's work on in- 

 sects, " that if animals are transmuted so may metals 3 ," 

 it was not, in fact, with his limited knowledge on these 

 subjects, so very preposterous. It is even possible that some 

 of the wonderful tales of the ancients were grafted on the 

 changes which they observed to take place in insects. The 

 death and revivification of the phoenix, from the ashes of 

 which, before attaining its perfect state, arose first a worm 

 (crxwAvj^), in many of its particulars resembles what occurs 

 in the metamorphoses of insects. Nor is it very unlikely 

 that the doctrine of the metempsychosis took its rise from 

 the same source. What argument would be thought by 

 those who maintained this doctrine more plausible in fa- 

 vour of the transmigration of souls, than the seeming re- 

 vivification of the dead chrysalis ? What more probable, 

 than that its apparent reassumption of life should be ow- 

 ing to its receiving for tenant the soul of some criminal 

 doomed to animate an insect of similar habits with those 

 which had defiled his human tenement 15 ? 



At the present day, however, the transformations of 

 insects have lost that excess of the marvellous, which 



a Epist. Dedicat. 



h " A priest who has drunk wine shall migrate into a moth or fly, 

 feeding on ordure. He who steals the gold of a priest shall pass a 

 thousand times into the bodies of spiders. If a man shall steal honey, 

 he shall be born a great stinging gnat ; if oil, an oil-drinking beetle ; 

 if salt, a cicada ; if a household utensil, an ichneumon fly." Institutes 

 of Menu, 353. 



