HARMONIES OF NATURE.

143

converting them also into mediums of intercourse with things unseen, existing within and around us. But let our imaginative regions, which in all but material substance may be regions of reality, be never peopled by the dark appalling visions of a distempered fancy. Let us, rather, through the visible millions which fill the earth and sky with insect music, be led to a pleasant but chastening consciousness of the presence of those "millions of spiritual creatures" which

"Walk the earth

Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep ;"

and whose appointed office, besides that of " singing their Great Creator," may be to fill with harmony the moral elements which make our world of mind.

Phantoms look if ko the Death-watch drum...

"Loveliest of lovely things are they
On earth, which soonest pass away."

"Here lies the man-was born, and cried;
Lived sixty years-fell sick, and died!"

OUR chosen emblems of fragility are flowers; and, fixed by the laws of their creation to one spot, where they bud, and bloom, and wither beneath our eye, we have been compelled, almost, to notice their brevity, and are sensible, at times, of the moral odour which exhales from the union of their beauty and fragility.

INSECTS FRAGILE AS FLOWERS.

145

In the world of insects, examples of existence, bright and brief and most precarious, are no less common, and in many respects (especially as occurring amongst sensitive beings) infinitely more striking; but, except with those sporters of a day, hence called Ephemera, the frail tenures of insect life seldom serve to remind us of the like nature of our own, and chiefly, perhaps, for the following reason. Many a brilliant flutterer is cut off in the midst of its joyous activity, much more suddenly than the flower over which we have seen it hover, but ere the scattered petals of the one have strewed the surface of the ground, the wings of the other have borne it to die unseen within some hidden covert; or, contributing in death to the support of life, it may have sunk suddenly into the devouring gulf of some insectivorous bird, or carnivorous feeder of its own race.

It is, by the way, a remarkable dispensation of Nature's Author, and one equally beautiful and kind, that while Death is for ever busy, as elsewhere, in the lower departments of the animal kingdom, so few of the victims they afford him are permitted to offend the eye in any shapes of disgust or danger. To confine this observation merely to insects :-We see the air teeming with gnats; the ground populous with ants and beetles; the fields, especially towards the end of summer, alive with grasshoppers and Tipulidan flies; the hedges, through the months of June and July, scarcely more abundant in leaves than in the smaller moths, which in daytime make a covert of

146

DISAPPEARANCE OF REMAINS.

their foliage and of these countless myriads we are told, truly,

:

that even of those among them permitted to reach their good old age, scarce a single gnat survives a week; not half the beetles, nor any of the Tipula, nor grasshoppers, a month; while few are the butterflies or moths which over-live a fortnight. What has become of them? may naturally be queried by those who bestow upon the subject a mere passing thought; and though with those who have learnt something of insect history the marvel is greatly diminished, it still remains matter of some surprise, that of the myriads which die daily round and about our paths, so few "mortal remains" should meet our eye. Something, in short, of the same sort of mystery is attached to their entire disappearance as that which seems to have been noticed by some of old Fuller's "worthies," with regard to the disappearance of pins, which caused them to admire "that so many millions of these useful and neat little articles made, sold, used, and lost in England, should vanish away invisible;" to the which remark, our excellent divine, with gravity becoming his profession, and quaintness belonging to his style and character, appends this serious reflection :-that "such persons may rather wonder how so many that wear them, being no more than pins in the hand of their Maker, do decay, die, and slip down in the dust in silence and obscurity."

The duration of insect life varies greatly; but there is one remark respecting it of very general application:-Its last and most perfect stage is usually the most brief, often immensely

STAGES OF INSECT LIFE.

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disproportioned to those which have preceded it. To adduce only a few examples.—

The great goat-moth,* while yet a caterpillar, occupies, in solitary darkness, the trunk of willow, oak, or poplar. For three successive summers it is employed in eating into the solid wooden barrier which divides it from the sunny world,— for as many winters it sleeps within one of the dark tunnels thus excavated by its powerful jaws; but after this extended period of repletion and repose, it scarcely lives over the same complement of weeks to exercise its broad, dusky pinions in the summer moonlight.

Other moths and butterflies remain various periods, but frequently months, and sometimes years, in their aurelian state of semi-torpor, while few of them are permitted to enjoy their flitting delights for much longer than a fortnight.

The same is exemplified in various beetles. The cockchafer,† as a grub or larva, first opens its eyes on the darkness of a subterranean nest under the surface of a meadow, where, with its numerous brood-brethren, it subsists (often to the farmer's serious injury) upon the roots of grass. Unless unearthed by ploughshare, snout of swine, or bill of bird, the grub of the chafer thus continues for four gloomy years working his covert mischief; but when arrived at the maturity of his beetle form, he only feasts upon foliage, and travels, whir

* Cossus ligniperda.

+ Melolontha vulgaris.