Supposing, therefore, we had found the egg of either of these butterflies at the moment of its creation, we should assuredly have found it on the nettle or the cabbage (as the case might be); because to suppose it in any other situation would be equivalent to supposing it so placed as that the end of its creation--the life of the species created--would be _ipso facto_ frustrated. But, finding it so, the question naturally arises,--Why here, and not elsewhere? and the only possible answer, on the ground of phenomena, is, Because the parent chose this situation for it. And thus we are inevitably thrown back to an anterior generation, which is equivalent to past time. Again, if we had seen the egg of the Nut Weevil (_Balaninus nucum_) just come from the creative hand of God, we should certainly have found it within the immature soft-shelled hazel-nut, because there alone would the grub when hatched meet with "food convenient for" it. And yet if we had sought (ignorant of the fact of its recent creation) the reason of its being there, our acquaintance with entomology would have pointed to the parent beetle, who, with her jaws placed at the tip of a long slender snout, had bored a tiny hole in the tender shell, and had then projected the egg from her abdomen into the interior. The eggs of the _Oestridae_--for example, the Worble of the Ox (_Oestrus bovis_) or the Bot of the Sheep (_Oe. ovis_)--would be discovered in no other circumstances than beneath the skin of the former, and at the edge of the nostrils of the latter. For these are the respective situations in which the egg is always deposited, that of the Worble hatching _in situ_, and forming a superficial abscess in communication with the external air, and that of the Sheep-bot producing a larva which crawls up the nostrils of the poor animal, till it finds a suitable resting-place in the frontal sinuses of the skull. To suppose the egg in any other circumstances than those which I have mentioned, would be to consign it to certain destruction. Yet does not its presence there bear witness to the eclectic care of the parent Gadfly, whose unerring instinct knew how to seek and select the right position? If you had set yourself to look for the egg of a _Pimpla manifestator_, a common Cuckoo-fly, where would you have looked for it, but in the fatty tissues of a wild bee's grub, that was lodged in a deep hole in some old post? If you had sought elsewhere, you would surely have been disappointed. And would not its presence there bear testimony to the lengthened ovipositor of the well-known brisk and busy fly, and to its remarkable habits?[93]