Much of glamour might,
Could make a ladye seem a knight,
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall.
And Nature, in her turn exercising her powerful glamour, can make a caterpillar seem a twig, or a moth look exactly like a withered leaf. The Spider-crab might be taken for a moving mass of zoophytes and corallines, so thickly is its shell covered with extraneous growths. The Leaf-insects are so exactly like leaves that the most experienced eye can scarcely distinguish them from the leaves among which they are placed. We must all have noticed other instances in which the colours of insects, and also the plumage of birds, harmonise in a wonderful way with the scenes in the midst of which they are placed. Indeed there seems no end to the resemblance which may be traced between the works of Nature and those of man. Many of the most obvious of these strike us with fresh surprise when we find the comparison carefully drawn out. What a freak of Nature, for instance, are the aphides, the milk-cows of a species of ant; or the tailor-bird, ‘which sews leaves together by their edges, and makes its nest inside them!’ It is sufficiently strange too, to remember that the elaborate process of paper-making was carried on by the wasps, ages before it was known to the Chinese.
One of the most powerful of all natural forces is that of electricity; and it is at present so little understood, and so full of mystery, that we may perhaps suppose that many of the most important discoveries of the future must lie in that direction. But Nature has known how to turn this as well as her other powers to her own use. She has her living galvanic batteries, such as the torpedo and the electric eel, both of which secure their prey by paralysing it with their electric discharges. And the light of the glow-worm and that of the fire-fly, though hitherto it has been a puzzle to naturalists, may, there is little doubt, be referred to animal electricity.
After a careful perusal of the book, we are convinced that the more closely the connection between Nature and human inventions is observed, the more perfect and the more numerous will further discoveries be. Endowed with high moral capabilities of truth and justice, and benevolence; gifted with reasoning faculties, which enable him to observe, to argue, to draw conclusions, it is for man himself to work according to the same laws which, unconsciously to themselves, govern the organisations of the lower animal, and the vegetable world.
[WASTE SUBSTANCES.]
CIGAR-ENDS.