Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly,
Yet none of them he rudely doth disorder;
Nor with his feet, their silken leaves deface,
But pastures on the pleasures of each place.’”
CHAPTER XII.
About insects in general.
I will now give my readers a short chapter upon insects in general, extracted from Aunt Betsey Piper’s talk to her inquisitive nephew.
Insects are so called because they appear to be divided into two parts, and the word insect means cut apart. The insect tribe are divided by naturalists into several orders. The first consists of those that never have wings, as the spider, flea, louse, &c.; the second consists of those which have wings, but so cased up as not to appear when first produced, such as the grasshopper, earwig, dragon-fly, &c.; the third is of the moth and butterfly kind; the fourth such as come from a worm instead of a caterpillar, as the beetle, bee, fly, gnat, &c.
We are very apt to conceive that insects, from their extreme littleness, are very insignificant. But this is a wrong view of the subject. In the first place, they are exceedingly ingenious in their structure, and wonderful in their habits and instincts. A writer on natural history says, that if we compare insects with the higher ranks of nature, such as quadrupeds, birds, &c., we shall perceive in the former all the peculiarities which belong to the latter; the piercing eye of the lynx and the falcon, the hard shield of the armadillo, the splendid tail of the peacock, the imposing horns of the stag, the swiftness of the antelope, the fecundity of the hare, the architectural powers of the beaver, the climbing powers of the squirrel, the gambols of the monkey, the swimming of the frog, the burrowing of the mole, and the leaping of the kangaroo; all these things are found amongst insects, and often, indeed, in a redoubled degree. The eye of the fly, with its thousand lenses, the scales of the diamond beetle, the wonderful works of the hive, the ingenuity of the spider, the transformation of the butterfly,—these and many other interesting circumstances show that this class of animated nature possesses strong claims upon our attention.
The amazing extent of the insect tribes also increases the interest of this subject. In the royal collection at Berlin, in Prussia, there are no less than twenty-eight thousand species or kinds of beetle. Celebrated naturalists have calculated that there are, in the world, five hundred thousand different kinds of insects, and countless myriads of each kind. It is said that one single insect of the aphis or louse tribe may be the living parent of six thousand millions of descendants. If all the insects in the world were collected into one heap, it would doubtless rise ten times as high as the top of Bunker-Hill monument, near Boston.