[96] Epist. Dedicat.
[97] "A priest who has drunk wine shall migrate into a moth or fly, feeding on ordure. He who steals the gold of a priest shall pass a thousand times into the bodies of spiders. If a man shall steal honey, he shall be born a great stinging gnat; if oil, an oil-drinking beetle; if salt, a cicada; if a household utensil, an ichneumon fly." Institutes of Menu, 353.
[98] Hill's Swamm. ii. 24. t. 37. f. 2. 4.
[99] De Bombyce, 29.
[100] Reaum. i. 359.
[101] Hill's Swamm. i. 127 a.
[102] Do you not perceive that we are caterpillars, born to form the angelic butterfly?
[103] It is worthy of remark, that in the north and west of England the moths that fly into candles are called saules (souls), perhaps from the old notion that the souls of the dead fly about at night in search of light. For the same reason, probably, the common people in Germany call them ghosts (geistchen).
[104] Nares's Essays, i. 101-2.
[105] A few vertebrate animals, viz. frogs, toads, and newts, undergo metamorphoses in some respects analogous to those of insects; their first form as tadpoles being very different from that which they afterwards assume. These reptiles too, as well as snakes, cast their skin by an operation somewhat similar to that in larvæ. There is nothing, however, in their metamorphoses at all resembling the pupa state in insects.