INDIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 249 



of beings empowered to remove all her superfluous pro- 

 ductions from the face of nature ; and in effecting this, 

 whatever individual injury may arise, insects must be 

 deemed general benefactors. Even the locusts which lay 

 waste whole countries clear the way for the renovation of 

 their vegetable productions, which were in danger of being 

 destroyed by the exuberance of some individual species, 

 and thus are fulfilling the great law of the Creator, that of 

 all which he has made nothing should be lost. A region, 

 Sparrman tells us, which had been choked up by shrubs, 

 perennial plants, and hard half-withered and unpalatable 

 grasses, after being made bare by these scourges, soon ap- 

 pears in a far more beautiful dress, clothed with new herbs, 

 superb lilies, and fresh annual grasses, and young and 

 juicy shoots of the perennial kinds, affording delicious 

 herbage for the wild cattle and game 4 . And though the 

 interest of individual man is often sacrificed to the general 

 good, in many cases the insect pests which he most exe- 

 crates will be found to be positively beneficial to him, un- 

 less when suffered to increase beyond their due bounds. 

 Thus the insects that attack the roots of the grasses, 

 and, as has been before observed, so materially injure our 

 herbage, the wire- worm, the larvae of Melolontha vulgaris, 

 Tipula oleracea, &c, in ordinary seasons only devour so 

 much as is necessary to make room for fresh shoots, and 

 the production of new herbage ; in this manner maintain- 

 ing a constant succession of young plants, and causing an 

 annual though partial renovation of our meadows and 

 pastures. In the rich fields near Rye in Sussex I parti- 

 cularly observed this effect ; and I have since at home re- 

 marked, that at certain times of the year dead plants may 

 a Sparrman's Voyage, i. o(>7» - 



