UTILITY OF INSECTS AND WORMS. 
99 
Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by 
discover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger 
organisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous 
machine, and we shall have as eloquent pleas in defence of 
the mosquito, and perhaps even of the tzetze fly, as Toussenel 
and Michelet have framed in behalf of the bird.* The silk¬ 
worm and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by 
the puncture of an insect on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingre¬ 
dient in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I 
recognize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay 
habiliments of the holiday groups beneath them. But agricul¬ 
ture, too, is indebted to the insect and the worm. The an¬ 
cients, according to Pliny, were accustomed to hang branches 
foreign countries, but I can testify to one such case. A stork, which had 
nested near one of the palaces on the Bosphorus, had, by some accident, 
injured a wing, and was unable to join his fellows when they commenced 
their winter migration to the banks of the Nile. Before he was able to fly 
again, he was caught, and the flag of the nation to which the palace 
belonged was tied to his leg, so that he was easily identified at a consid¬ 
erable distance. As his wing grew stronger, he made several unsatis¬ 
factory experiments at flight, and at last, by a vigorous effort, succeeded 
in reaching a passing ship bound southward, and perched himself on a 
topsail yard. I happened to witness this movement, and observed him 
quietly maintaining his position as long as I could discern him with a spy¬ 
glass. I suppose he finished the voyage, for he certainly did not return to 
the palace. 
* The enthusiasm of naturalists is not always proportioned to the mag¬ 
nitude or importance of the organisms they concern themselves with. It 
is not recorded that Adams, who found the colossal antediluvian pachy¬ 
derm in a thick-ribbed mountain of Siberian ice, ran wild over his trou¬ 
vaille ; but Schmidl, in describing the natural history of the caves of the 
Karst, speaks of an eminent entomologist as “ der gluckliche Entdecker ,” 
the happy discoverer of a new coleopteron, in one of those dim caverns. 
How various are the sources of happiness! Think of a learned German 
professor, the bare enumeration of whose Rath-ships and scientific Mitglied- 
ships fills a page, made famous in the annals of science, immortal, happy, 
by the discovery of a beetle! Had that imperial ennuye , who offered a 
premium for the invention of a new pleasure, but read SchmidTs Eohlen 
des Karstes , what splendid rewards would he not have heaped upon Kirby 
and Spence 1 
