Ingenious precautions! The orphan born completely naked, and launched into life unprotected to undergo the most toilsome metamorphoses, is rendered competent for the task only by eating greedily from the moment of its birth, absorbing and devouring! It must eat always and everywhere, even in the least respirable atmosphere, and in unhealthy and deadly places. It is for this reason nature has endowed it with a slower, and, if I may so speak, a more suspicious circulation and respiration, than that of the superior creatures which live only in pure air. In these creatures, as in man, the blood continually flows to meet the air and be vivified by it. In the insect, on the contrary, the protecting apparatus which guards its lateral mouths are disposed in such a manner as to be able always to moderate, sift, and, if need be, exclude, the invading atmosphere. One is overcome with surprise by the infinite variety of the combinations designed for this end, the numerous mechanical and chemical arts of the most complicated character. To receive and yet not receive, to breathe without breathing, to preserve the control of what must nevertheless be a passive function, to trust and yet mistrust, to surrender and yet protect, is the difficult problem which life here proposed to itself, and of which it has found innumerable solutions. To give air to a grub! Behold, arrogant humanity, which callest thyself the centre of all things, the most laborious effort that has engrossed the powers of nature! Its circulation resembles that of the embryo in the bosom of its mother. But how much less favourable the condition of the insect! The foetus is in immediate contact with the world through the soft maternal medium. The motherless insect embryo does not swim, like the other, in a sea of milk. It is cradled in the rude mould of the universal life; it travels therein at great peril, on the rude earth, from shock to shock. This fact the moderns have recognized,--_the insect is an embryo_. But who would suppose that this very circumstance would doom it to death? How rude a contradiction! An embryo launched into the thick of the fray, to be the victim of all--of birds, and even of insects. An embryo armed, it is true; and nothing is stranger than to see the soft grubs brandishing their threatening jaws, while their feeble body, deprived of all defence, is exposed on every side. Flight offers them but few chances; their best protection is night. And therefore they shun the light,--they live as they can under the ground, in the wood, or at least beneath the leaf. If this be true of the larvæ, the grubs, of what we call worms, we may say the same of the insect. For its first period (that of the larva) endures a considerable time, though its life as a nymph, and finally its third period, last but a very brief while. Numerous species (May-bugs, stag-beetles, and the like) have three to six years of a tenebrous existence, and only three months under the sun.