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wisdom, and that even in the humblest insect a lesson may be learned on the perfections of God. Can, then, the gnat be reflected on by the Christian without grateful adoration to Him, who manifests his care for the meanest creature he has called into being, and thus gives an assurance, made a thousand-fold more clear by his word, that all who trust in Him are the objects of his special regard and benevolence?

In osier holts may be found one of the largest and most beautiful of our beetles. And here the observer may be recommended to smell the insects he takes. There is scarcely a scent odious or agreeable that may not be met with in the insect world. The rose-scented capricorn, or musk-beetle, for instance, has long been noted for the delicious odour it emits. This is so powerful as to fill a whole apartment, and the insect retains it long after its death. Another species of the same genus has, in a high degree, a scent resembling that of the cedar on which they feed.

Listen, and you may often hear the shrill noise of the field-cricket. "Sounds," says White of Selborne, "do not always give us pleasure according to their sweetness and melody; nor do harsh sounds always displease. Thus, the shrilling of the field-cricket, though sharp and stridulous, yet marvellously delights

THE MOLE CRICKET.

some hearers, filling their minds with a train of summer ideas of everything that is rural, verdurous, and joyous." One of these insects when confined in a paper cage and set in the sun, and supplied with plants moistened with water, will feed and thrive, and become, perhaps, too merry and loud for a person who is sitting in the same

room.

The mole-cricket is a singular creature. It burrows

THE MOLE-CRICKET,

under ground, and devours the roots of plants, thus causing them to wither. A black ground beetle devours its eggs. To defend them the female places

herself at the entrance of the nest, which is a neatlysmoothed and rounded chamber, protected by labyrinths, ditches and ramparts; and whenever the beetle attempts to seize its prey, she catches it and bites

it asunder.

For moving the prodigious arms of this creature a very powerful and peculiar apparatus is provided.

There, too, are the grasshoppers, that we hear on every sunny bank, and which make every heath vocal. They begin their song, which is a short chirp regularly interrupted, long before sun-rise. In the heat of the day it is intermitted, and resumed in the evening. The Cicada-called Tettix by the ancient Greeks, by whom they were often kept in cages for the sake of their song-seem to have been the favourites of every Grecian bard. Supposed to be perfectly harmless, and to live only on the dew, they were ever addressed by endearing epithets. Anacreon welcomes the Cicada as "the sweet prophets of the summer." So attached were the Athenians to these insects, that they were accustomed to fasten golden images of them in their hair.

It appears, therefore, that the Cicade of Greece must have been musical. No harsh and deafening note could have obtained for it so much admiration. The sound of this insect and of the harp, were called, indeed, by one and the same name. A Cicada sitting on a harp was a usual emblem of the science of music. Two rival musicians, it is said, were contending on that instrument, when a Cicada flying to one of them

ENTOMOLOGY.

and sitting on his harp, supplied the place of a broken string, and so secured to him the victory. To excel this insect in singing seems to have been the highest commendation of a singer; and even the eloquence of Plato was not thought to suffer by a comparison with it.

Entomology, the science of insects, has its interesting pursuits and rewards like Botany, the science of plants. This, therefore, should the young be encouraged to study. The surface of a country consists of mountains, hills, and valleys, or of plains. It is diversified by forest, wood, or copse, and watered by rivers, rivulets, lakes, and pools. Those parts that are not clothed with wood, are either open or inclosed, forming grassy downs, heaths, pastures, meadows, morasses, and arable land. The soil, also, is equally various: clay, loam, marl, chalk, vegetable mould, moor, sand, and other substances appear.

The mountains and hills are either covered with a bed of soil, or are rocky and bare; the arable lands are divided by living or dead fences, formed of various materials, or else they are open, the property being marked by grassy balks. All these places abound with plants; and these, as opportunity serves, the entomologist should explore. Still further, he must look also

to the sea, and its sandy, pebbly, or rocky shores, and the sea wrack that is cast upon them; the estuaries that receive its tides; and the brackish waters and saline marshes in its vicinity.

Nor should it be forgotten that the earth itself, as well as the objects on its surface, the creatures in its waters, and the orbs of the firmament, deserves our attention. Of great value, for instance, is the blue limestone, which is generally of a dark dove colour, and of a dull earthy aspect. It forms occasional beds in the transition and mountain limestone deposits, but constitutes nearly the whole of the lias limestone. This latter is one of the most remarkable of the English strata. Its name is supposed to be owing to a provincial corruption of the word layers, used by the workmen to denote those partings into which many of its shales are liable to divide.

The lias, like the oolite-so called from the Greek words for an egg and a stone, because it is formed of small egg-like grains like the roe of a fish-forms a belt extending across our island from its south-western to its north-eastern shores, from Lyme Regis, in Dorsetshire, to the north of Whitby, where it is lost beneath the moorlands of the Yorkshire coast. In its southward course it passes to the east of York, and crosses

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