534 
ARTICTJLATA. 
recommendation, tliat it is one of those brandies of Zoology that may be pursued in any 
situation. Insects abound everywhere, and wherever they occur, their habits may be observed and 
their structure investigated. " They appear," if we may use the beautiful language of Kirby 
and Spence, " to have been nature's favorite productions, in which, to manifest her power and 
skill, she has combined and concentrated almost all that is either beautiful and graceful, inter- 
esting and alluring, or curious and singular, in every other class and order of her children. To 
these, her valued miniatures, she has given the most delicate touch and highest finish of her 
pencil. Numbers she has armed with glittering mail, which reflects a luster like that of burn- 
ished metals ; in others she lights up the dazzling radiance of polished gems. Some she has 
decked with what looks like liquid drops, or plates of gold and silver ; or with scales or pile, which 
mimic the color and emit the ray of the same precious metals. Some exhibit a rude exterior, 
like stones in their native state, while others represent their smooth and shining face, after they 
have been submitted to the tool of the polisher ; others again, like so many pigmy Atlases bear- 
ing on their backs a microcosm, by the rugged and various elevations and depressions of their 
tuberculated crust, present to the eye of the beholder no unapt imitation of the unequal surface 
of the earth — now horrid with misshapen rocks, ridges and precipices, now swelling into hills 
and mountains, and now sinking into valleys, glens, and caves ; while not a few are covered with 
branching spines, which fancy may form into a forest of trees. What numbers vie with the 
charming offspring of Flora in various beauties ! — some in the delicacy and variety of their 
colors not like those of flowers, evanescent and fugitive, but fixed and durable, surviving their 
subject, and adorning it as much after death as they did when it was alive ; others again in 
the veining and texture of their wings; and others in the rich cottony down that clothes them. 
To such perfection, indeed, has nature in them carried her mimetic art, that you would declare, 
upon beholding some insects, that they had robbed the trees of their leaves to form for them- 
selves artificial wings, so exactly do they resemble them in their form, substance, and vascular 
structure ; some representing green leaves, and others those that are dry and withered. Nay, 
sometimes this mimicry is so exquisite that you would mistake the whole insect for a portion of 
the branching spray of a tree. 
THE MOUKNING-CLOAK BUTTERPLT. 
"In fishes, the lucid scales of varied hue that cover and defend them are universally admired, 
and esteemed their peculiar ornament ; but place a butterfly's wing under a microscope — that 
avenue to unseen glories in new worlds — and you will discover that nature has endowed the most 
numerous of the insect tribes with the same privilege, multiplying in them the forms, and diver- 
sifying the coloring of this kind of clothing, beyond all parallel. The rich and velvet tints of the 
plumage of birds are not superior to what the curious observer may discover in a variety of 
Lepidoptera, and those many-colored eyes which deck so gloriously the peacock's tail are imi- 
