not, there is one great lesson to be learnt from them that little fellows will be treated with great respect if they are ready to defend themselves when attacked, though they may go about their business at other times with all the patience expected in a civilised community.

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INSECT APPETITE.

HE man who wished he had a throat a mile long, and a palate all the

way, might envy the feats performed in the world of insignificance. Some insects are endowed with an appetite so keen, and a digestion so rapid, that they eat incessantly throughout the whole of their lives. They begin as soon as they are born, and go steadily on till they die. Their existence is a feast, without a change of plates, or a pause between the courses. Morning, noon, and night, their mouths are full, and an endless procession of favourite food gratifies the unwearied palate. They know not the names of meals. Breakfast commences with infancy, and their only after-dinner nap is a passage to another state of existence.

This is generally the case with grubs, where the eggs from which they are produced are laid in the food on which they live. Thus they lose no time when they come into

Their Work is to eat.

147

the world. Everything is prepared for them. Their work is to eat. They have no other calling, amusement, or pursuit. Talk of a pig! In a natural state, he has to think and bestir himself to get victuals. His intellect is exercised in searching for the whereabouts of acorns, snails, and what not. Besides, society expects him, occasionally, to lie in the sun. and grunt. Many hours of his youth are spent in spasmodic gambols with his little brothers and sisters. Unless shut Unless shut up, and supplied by man, he never grows fat. A cow, certainly, contrives to fill up a good deal of her time in gratifying the sense of taste. What with bona-fide eating, and then

material review of that process, with her eyes shut, she makes the most of a mouthful.

But for steady consistent application commend me to a grub. While in that state, the quantity of food consumed by insects is vastly greater, in proportion to their bulk, than that required by larger animals. Some caterpillars eat twice their weight of leaves daily which is, as if a man of twelve stone were to get through something over two hundred legs of mutton in the course of a week. There are larvæ, however, who dis

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Refinement-Endurance.

tance the caterpillars. The maggots of flesh flies have been said actually to treble their weight in half an hour.

As might possibly be expected, these animals in the next stage of their existence, which is as sublimated as before it was gross, eat very little. The greedy caterpillar, when become a butterfly, dips the tip of its tongue in honey; and the maggot itself, when transformed into a fly, is content with an occasional whet of its proboscis.

But there are many insects in a state higher than that of vulgar larvæ who distinguish themselves at table. The ant-lion will devour

daily an animal of its own size. Fancy the Fusileer Guards eating up the LondonScottish at a meal. But though these little Heliogabali are so greedy, their powers of abstinence are equal to their appetite.

Instances are given in that charming book, Entomology," by Kirby & Spence, of a spider being made to fast, without injury, for ten months, and of a beetle kept alive for three years without food. Another writer, a foreigner, tells us of a mite, which he gummed alive to the point of a needle, and placed before his microscope, and adds that it took eleven weeks to die. Horrible!

Variety of Food.

149

The quality of animal food is also as remarkable as the quantity they consume. There is hardly anything which some one or other of this extensive family of living creatures will not eat. Man, indeed, is almost omnivorous; by artificial means he is enabled to prepare food from a vast variety of animal and vegetable matter; but the other large animals are generally confined to the leaves, fruit, and seeds of plants. Not so insects. Some live upon the leaf, some eat their way into the heart of the solid wood, others prefer the pith, while a few will touch nothing but bark. The bee selects honey, but there are little creatures who get their living head over ears in vinegar.

Of those which feed upon flesh, some wait until it has begun to decay, while others feast upon it before it is dead. The gadfly gets beneath the skin of an ox, where it sets up an action like a seton, and feeds upon the result. The ichneumon, too, is lodged and boarded in the living body of a caterpillar, and eats up his apartments at last so thoroughly, that on the cocoon which the caterpillar spins being opened, an ichneumon steps out, instead of a butterfly or a moth.

It is questioned whether the power of