MISCELLANIES BY SOLITARILY, 



497 



No noble e'er, to pomp a slave, 

 To peers a sumptuous breakfast gave, 



With half such joy, as I 

 Scatter the crumbs with lavish hand, 

 And watch the little feather'd band, 



And mark each sparkling eye; 

 Until my little guests at length 

 By gathering crumbs have gather'd strength, 



To spread their wings and fly.— E. F. 



One of the greatest proofs of 'the insensibility of insects to pain is 

 afforded by the fact, that many will live for months with pins stuck 

 •through their bodies. Having set a specimen of Blaps obtusa, I shut it up 

 in a box, quite confident that I had killed it, but, to my surprise, on 

 opening the box three weeks afterwards, I found that it was still alive 

 and sufficiently strong to turn itself round upon the pin. He probably 

 simulated death in the first instance, as many other insects are in the 

 habit of doing when impaled. Such instances as these tend to establish 

 that which I strongly believe to be the case, namely, that beetles and 

 other animals exposed to constant danger are not subject to the usual 

 agonies of death. Shakspeare said that " the beetle that>we tread upon 

 in corporal sufferance feels a pang as great as when a "giant dies." 

 Upon which passage the critic has observed, " Ah ! and a great deal 

 more too, for he feels no pang when the giant dies." From the many 

 facts of which we are in possession, and from the numerpus papers 

 which have been written upon the insensibility of insects to pain, it 

 appears that the meaning Shakspeare intended to convey, of the pain 

 felt by a beetle when dying being comparatively as great as though it 

 were a giant under the suffering of death, is most probably devoid of 

 truth, and if so, the criticism is as far from being correct as the passage 

 to which it relates. 



The revival of animals from a state of inactive torpidity into a state 

 of reaction presents many singular facts to the contemplative philoso- 

 pher who muses upon the extraordinary wonders of nature, to the 

 physician who endeavours to discover more respecting either the 

 materiality or the spirituality of life, and to the naturalist who, not 

 satisfied with a mere detail of facts, labours to trace effects to their 

 causes. It is stated in the Kaleidoscope for 1822, at page 106, that 

 Mr. Beddome, a chemist in Tooley-street, London, thus writes to the 

 editor of the Times : — " Sir, having lately read in the very interesting 

 Introduction to Entomology, by Messrs HKirby and Spence, of the 



VOL. I.— NO. XI. (NOVEMBER, 1833.) P P 



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