METAMORPHOSES. 



49 



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 long, 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 trans- 

 formation as singular and surprising, though varied in many 

 of its circumstances. That active little fly, now an unbidden 

 guest at your tabled 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 inhabitant 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 

 antennae, 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, composes 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 Shakspere, Collins, and 



1 " Coenis etiam non vocatus ut Musca advolo." Aristophon in Pijthagorista 

 apud Athenaeum. (Mouffet, 56.) 



VOL I. E 



