(Vol. vi., p. 263.)
Up to a very recent period, it was held, even by philosophers, that each of the four elements, as well as every living plant and animal, both
brute and human, generated insects; but of all sources of this equivocal generation, none was considered more potent than the putrefaction or corruption of animal matter: as Du Bartas says:
"God, not contented to each kind to give,
And to infuse the virtue generative,
By His wise power, made many creatures breed,
Of lifeless bodies without Venus' deed."
Sixth Day.
Pliny, after giving Virgil's receipt for making bees, gives similar instances:
"Like as dead horses will breed waspes and hornets; and asses carrion, turne to be beetle-flies by a certaine metamorphosis which Nature maketh from one creature to another."—Lib. xi. c. xx.