194 
NATURAL HISTORY OP 
her the labours requisite for the preservation of their 
race, it is not surprising that the Egyptians, at a 
period when such erroneous notions prevailed re- 
garding the generation of the lower animals, should 
have imagined that there was only one sex, and that, 
they should have preferred to consider it as the 
one which has most privileges attached to it, or, 
as grammarians call it, the more worthy gender. 
Admitting the doctrine of spontaneous generation, 
it was necessary, according to their principles, that 
the insects should disinter their balls and bring them 
into contact with water, as that element was conceiv- 
ed to produce, with the concurrence of heat, all 
those animals that were without living progenitors.* 
In more recent times the industrious habits of 
these little insects appear sometimes to have ex- 
cited nearly as much admiration as they did in 
Egypt. In the earliest entomological work pub- 
lished in Britain, f remarkable for the extent of 
its cumbrous erudition, the species of which we 
speak, or another closely allied to it, forms one of 
an extensive series of figures, a few of which bear 
some resemblance to the objects they are designed 
to represent, and several folio pages are devoted to 
* See an interesting memoir by Latreille, in the Ann: 
du Mus. for 1819, entitled Dcs Insectes prints ou sculptes sur 
les monuments antiques dc VEgyptc. 
*|* Moufeti Insectorum sive minimorum animalium 
Theatrum, London, 1634. 
