32 METAMORPHOSES. 
caterpillar is occupied by a capacious stomach. In the butterfly it has 
become converted into an almost imperceptible thread-like viscus; and the 
abdomen is now filled by two large packets of eggs, or other organs not 
visible in the first state. In the former, two spirally-convoluted tubes 
were filled with a silky gum; in the latte, both tubes and silk have almost 
totally vanished ; and changes equally great have taken place in the economy 
and structure of the nerves and other organs. : 
What a surprising transformation! Nor was this all. The change from 
one form to the other was not direct. An intermediate state net less 
singular intervened. After casting its skin even to its very jaws several 
times, and attaining its full growth, the caterpillar attached itself to a leaf 
by a silken girth, Its body greatly contracted: its skin once more split 
asunder, and disclosed an oviform mass, without exterior mouth, eyes, or 
limbs, and exhibiting no other symptom of life than a slight motion when 
touched. In this state of death-like torpor, and without tasting food, the 
insect existed for several months, until at length the tomb burst, and out 
of a case not more than an inch }ong, and a quarter of an inch in diameter, 
proceeded the butterfly before you, which covers a surface of nearly four 
inches square, 
Almost every insect which you see has undergone a transformation as 
singular and surprising, though varied in many of its circumstances. That 
active little fly, now an unbidden guest at your table!, whose delicate palate 
selects your choicest viands, one while extending his proboscis to the 
margin of a drop of wine, and then gaily flying to take a more solid repast 
from a pear or a peach; now gamboling with his comrades in the air, now 
gracefully currying his furled wings with his taper feet, was but the other 
day a disgusting grub, without wings, without legs, without eyes, wallowing, 
well pleased, in the midst of a mass of excrement. 
The “grey-coated gnat,” whose humming salutation, while she makes 
her airy circles about your bed, gives terrific warning of the sanguinary 
operation in which she is ready to engage, was a few hours ago the inha- 
bitant of a stagnant pool, more in shape like a fish than an insect. Then 
to have been taken out of the water would have been speedily fatal ; now 
it could as little exist in any other element than air, Then it breathed 
through its tail; now through openings in its sides. Its shapeless head, 
in that period of its existence, is now exchanged for one adorned with 
elegantly tufted antenna, and furnished, instead of jaws, with an apparatus 
more artfully constructed than the cupping-glasses of the phlebotomist — 
an apparatus, which, at the same time that it strikes in the lancets, com- 
poses a tube for pumping up the flowing blood. 
The ‘“‘shard-born beetle,’ whose “sullen horn,” as he directs his 
“droning flight” close past your ears in your evening walk, calling up in 
poetic association the lines in which he has been alluded to by Shakspeare, 
Collins, and Gray, was not in his infancy an inhabitant of air, the first 
period of his life being spent in gloomy solitude, as a grub, under the 
surface of the earth. The shapeless maggot, which you scarcely fail to 
meet with in some one of every handful of nuts you crack, would not 
always have grovelled in that humble state. If your unlucky intrusion 
upon its vaulted dwelling had not left it to perish in the wide world, it 
1 “Coonis etiam non yocatus ut Musca advolo.” Aristophon in Pythagorista 
apud Atheneum, (Mouffet, 56.) 
