proportionably much stronger, more active and vivacious than large ones. The spring of a flea in its first leap, how vastly does it outstrip any thing of which greater animals are capable! A mite, how vastly swifter does it run than a racehorse! M. de L'Isle has given the computation of the velocity of a little creature scarce visible by its smallness, which he found to run three inches in half a second: now, supposing its feet to be the fiftieth part of a line, it must make 500 steps in the space of three inches; that is, it must shift its legs 500 times in a second, or in the ordinary pulsation of an artery.

How sweet to muse upon His skill displayed
(Infinite skill!) in all that he has made.
To trace in Nature's most minute design,
The signature and stamp of Power Divine;
Contrivance exquisite expressed with ease,
Where unassisted sight no beauty sees;
The shapely limb and lubricated joint
Within the small dimensions of a point;
Muscle and nerve miraculously spun,
His mighty work who speaks, and it is done;
Th' invisible in things scarce seen revealed;
To whom an atom is an ample field..

COWPER.

In a word, the microscope endows us, as it were, with a new sense; unfolds the amazing operations of Nature, and displays to us wonders unimagined by former ages.

Who, a thousand years ago, would have thought it possible to distinguish myriads of living creatures in a single drop of water? That the purple tide of life, and even the globules of the blood should be seen distinctly, rolling through veins and arteries; smaller than the finest hair? That not only the exterior form, but even the internal structure of the bowels, and the motion of the fluids in a gnat er louse, should be rendered visible? Or, that

numberless species of creatures should be made objects of vision, though so minute, that a million of them are less than a grain of sand?

These are noble discoveries, on which a new philosophy has been raised, that enlarges the capacity of the human understanding, and affords more sublime and just ideas than mankind had before, of the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness of the Great Creator.

It was an observation of the excellent Mr. Boyle, that his wonder dwelt not so much on Nature's clocks as on her watches.' And, indeed, if we compare the structure of an elephant, with that of a mite, we shall perceive the justness of his remark. With whatever degree of surprise, or even of terror, we may at first consider the huge bulk and prodigious strength of the ele phant, we shall find our astonishment still greater, if we attentively examine the minute parts of the mite: for the latter has more limbs than the elephant; each of them (as I observed before) furnished with veins and arteries, nerves, muscles, tendons, and bones: it has eyes, a mouth, and a proboscis too (as well as the elephant) to take in its nourishment: a heart, moreover, to propel the circulation of the blood, a brain to supply nerves in every part, and the organs of generation as perfect as in the largest animal. Now, if the extreme minuteness of these parts is not merely surprising, but far above our utmost conception, what shall we say to those various species of animalcules, to which the mite itself, in size, is, as it were, an elephant?

How inconceivable it may appear, it is yet a fact, that a mite upon a cheese is as large and considerable, in proportion, as a man upon the earth. The little insects that feed upon the leaves of

peach-trees are no inappropriate representation of oxen grazing in large pastures; and the animalcules, in a drop of water, swim about with as much freedom as whales do in an ocean. They have all equal room in proportion to their bulk.

Nor power alone confessed in grandeur lies,
The glittering planet, or the painted skies;
Equal, the elephant's or emmet's dress,
The wisdom of Omnipotence confess;
Equal the cumbrous whale's enormous mass,
With the small insect in the crowded grass;
The mite that gambols, in its acid sea,
In shape a porpoise, tho' a speck to thee!
E'en the blue down the purple plum surrounds,
A living world, thy failing sight confounds!
To thee a peopled habitation shows,

Where millions taste the bounty God bestows.

BOYSE.

The discoveries of the microscope suggest to us this important truth, that our ideas of matter, magnitude, and minuteness, are merely comparative. They are taken from ourselves and the things around us, beyond which, if we endeavour to extend them, they become very indistinct. The beginnings and endings, excessive greatness or extreme littleness, of things, are to us all perplex. ity and confusion.

Let a man,' says Mr. Addison', 'try to conIceive the different bulk of an animal which is twenty, from another which is a hundred times less than a mite; or to compare, in his thoughts, a length of a thousand diameters of the earth with that of a million; and he will quickly find that he has no different measures in his mind, adjusted to such extraordinary degrees of grandeur or minuteness. The understanding, indeed, opens

Spectator, No. 420.

an infinite space on every side of us; but the Imagination, after a few faint efforts, is immediately at a stand, and finds itself swallowed up in the immensity of the void that surrounds it. Our Readers can pursue a particle of matter through an infinite variety of divisions; but the Fancy soon loses sight of it, and feels in itself a kind of chasm, that wants to be filled with matter of a more sensible bulk. We can neither widen nor contract the faculty to the dimensions of either extreme. The object is too big for our capacity, when we would comprehend the circumference of a world, and dwindles into nothing when we endeavour after the idea of an atom.'

But although the powers of the imagination be thus defective, the understanding is convinced by demonstration, and beholds this variety of wonders with astonishment and awe. Whether, with a Newton or a Herschel, we take the telescope, and compute the stupendous magnitude and velocity of a planet; or, with a Leewenhoeck or a Baker, survey, through a microscope, the structure and conformation of a mite; in each we are compelled to admire and adore the pervading wisdom and energy of the Creator:

In the Vast and the Minute

The unambiguous footsteps of the God,
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing,
And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds.

COWPER.

No. XXXIII.

A VIEW OF THE INSECT TRIBES

We wonder at a thousand insect forms,
These hatched, and those resuscitated worms,
New life ordained, and brighter scenes to share,
Once prone on earth, now buoyant upon air.

COWPER.

INSECTS exhibit such an immense variety in figure, colour, and disposition of parts, that naturalists have found it necessary to arrange them into different tribes or families, distinguished from one another by certain peculiarities in the structure of their bodies.

The most general division of insects is derived from the circumstance of their having or wanting wings, and from the number and substances of which these instruments of motion are composed. They are distinguished from all other animals by many peculiarities of form. None of other classes have more legs than four. But most insects have six; and many of them have eight, ten, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, and even a hundred legs. Beside the number of legs, insects are furnished with antenna, or feelers. These feelers, by which they grope and examine the substances they meet with, are composed of a great number of articulations or joints. Linné, and some other naturalists, maintain, that the uses of these feelers are totally unknown. But the slightest attention to the manner in which some insects employ their feelers will satisfy us of at least one use they derive from these organs. When a wingless insect is placed at the end of a twig, or in any situation where it meets with a vacuity, it moves the feelers backward and