INDIRECT BENEFITS DERIVED FROM INSECTS. 213 



merely because to discover it requires more extended and 

 remote views than we are enabled by our limited faculties to 

 take, and a knowledge of distant or concealed results which 

 we are incompetent to calculate or discover. The common 

 good of this terraqueous globe requires that all things en- 

 dowed with vegetable or animal life should bear certain pro- 

 portions to each other ; and if any individual species exceeds 

 that proportion, from beneficial it becomes noxious, and in- 

 terferes with the general welfare. It was requisite therefore 

 for the benefit of the whole system that certain means should 

 be provided, by which this hurtful luxuriance might be 

 checked, and all things taught to keep within their proper 

 limits : hence it became necessary that some should prey upon 

 others, and a part be sacrificed for the good of the whole. 



Of the counterchecks thus provided, none act a more im- 

 portant part than insects, particularly in the vegetable king- 

 dom, every plant having its insect enemies. Man, when he 

 takes any plant from its natural state and makes it an object 

 of cultivation, must expect that these agents will follow it 

 into the artificial state in which he has placed it, and still 

 prey upon it ; and it is his business to exert his faculties in 

 inventing means to guard against their attacks. It is a wise 

 provision that there should exist a race of beings empowered 

 to remove all her superfluous productions from the face of 

 nature ; and in efiecting 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 in- 

 dividual 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 un- 

 palatable grasses, after being made bare by these scourges, 

 soon appears 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, afibrding delicious herbage 

 for the wild cattle and game.^ And though the interest of 



' Sparrman's Voyage, i. 367. 



p 3 



