INTRODUCTION. 
Tue wonderful metamorphoses of insects affords 
a pleasing subject of contemplation to the human 
mind; and what in early ages seems to have been 
known as an undoubted fact, especially by the 
Greeks and Romans, was held to be merely imagi- 
nary in Britain, so late as the year 1634. Sir Theo- 
dore Mayerne, who edited Mouffet’s work on insects, 
entitled, Insectorwm sivi Animalium Theatrum, 
says, “ that if animals are transmuted, so may 
metals.” 
These astonishing and diversified transitions in 
the insect tribes, so well known to the ancients, 
gave a colouring to, and excited a belief in, many 
of the metamorphoses recorded by their poets. They 
were utterly unacquainted with the truths of modern 
physiological discoveries, so that the fact of a cater- 
pillar being transformed into a butterfly, must have 
appeared to them sufficient toupset all unbelief in the 
