The phenomena of the ant tribe deserve the study of the metaphysician, for displaying the possession and exertion of one of the most active and powerful forms of animal mind, in one of the smallest species of a visible body. They furnish another illustration of the great fact, that the living, sentient, and intellectual principle of animated nature, is essentially distinct from all material figure, substance, and size, and independent of them. Matter is the external investiture of mind, but can never rightfully claim an identity with it. The force of matter depends on density, magnitude, and impulse; on accumulation of particles, and external movement. But mind has its energy within itself, and is alike independent of configuration, bulk, or substance. It uses matter as its servant, but never originates from it. Its source is far more exalted and celestial.

The muscular powers of insects are still more superior to those of the greatest animals, than their comparative minds. Some amusing representations have been given of this difference. They have also another peculiarity, unequalled, and not possessed by any bird or quadruped. They can reproduce the limbs they may lose.t Their dif fusibility is also extraordinary, and in some species rivals that of plants. Hence, they may occasionally appear in the most distant countries, where before they were

• Linnæus remarks, that if an elephant were as strong in proportion as a stag beetle, he would be able to tear up rocks and to level moun tains.... A cock-chafer is for its size, six times as strong as a horse, Kirby, 4. p. 190... The flea and locust jump 200 times their own length, as if a man should leap three times as high as St. Paul's. Nat. Hist, Insects, 1. p. xvii.... The cuckoo-spit frog-hopper will sometimes leap two or three yards, which is more than 250 times its own length, as if a man should vault at once a quarter of a mile. Insect. Transf. v. 6, p. 179.... Mouffet relates, that an English mechanic named Brack, made a golden chain as long as a finger, with a lock and key, which was dragged by a flea. Mouff. Theat. Ins. 275. . . . Latreille mentions a flea of a moderate size dragging a silver cannon on wheels, that was 24 times its own weight, which being charged with powder was fired, without the flea seeming alarmed. N. Dict. Hist. Nat. v, 28, p. 249.... Kirby, 4. p. 188.

† M. Henneker found at Funchall, that the paws of the house spider were soon reproduced, especially in hot weather. So the antennæ of the clopesta, the wood louse; so in the aquatic salamander, as the claws and nippers of the crustaceous kind. He saw the blatter and reduves regain their paws and antennæ after amputation, especially their nymphes. So crickets and grasshoppers their forficules. Bull. Un. 1830, v. 4, p. 168.

Sir Joseph Banks had verified the fact as to spiders before. M. Samouelle quotes his account of it. Having lost five legs, the animal, on changing its skin, reproduced them; but they did not attain the size of the old ones. Sam. Ent. Comp. 120.

unknown. Such is their vitality that they can also live in the heat and confinement of he human stomach.t As some fish and squirrels can fly, so there is a species of

• The larva of some insects float in the air, and are wafted by the wind. In October 1827, near Moscow, snow fell in a N. w. wind; and with it a considerable quantity of blackish larvæ veloutés. M. Kaneff gathered several. In a vessel of snow they lived some time; and in cold water; but those, put in a warm place, soon perished... Mr. Fisher thinks that they are taken up from the earth in violent winds. ... Others of this kind fell near Zverrigorod, and in the winter of 1826 at Archangisky; others on a mountain near Moscow.

A similar phenomenon was remarked in November 1672, and in 1745, in Hungary. In 1749, "The ice of a lake near Sædermanland was covered with a great quantity of the same larvæ, which had been brought from the forests of Westermanland, where the wind had torn up several trees." Bull. Un. 1829, v. 8, p. 310..... So Dr. Hempush, sailing from Trieste down the Adriatic, found their ship covered with insects brought by the wind. Bull. Univ. 1830. p. 53.

The occasional though rare appearances of locusts, show us to what extent insects may travel with the wind. Twelve years ago, I caught one at Epsom. This was a straggler. But the entrance into Ireland, in 1688, of a species of beetle, scarabæus melotontha, described by Dr. Molyneux, was a visitation of resembling devourers almost as formidable, from some distant shore. . . . . "Vast swarms were brought into Galway by a southwest wind during the day. They hung in clusters from the boughs of trees; but about sunset they took wing, and darkened the air with their vast numbers. It was difficult to make one's way through them, for they dashed themselves against the face, and occasioned considerable pain. They fed upon the leaves of es; and the noise they made in eating was like the sawing of timber. For two or three miles round, every tree was stripped of its leaves, like the depth of winter. Smoke was found to be a preservative. The burning of heath and ferns kept or drove them out of gardens. Towards autumn they entirely disappeared, probably lodging under ground in a dormant state, for, next season, im mense quantities of them were found in some places, in holes under ground. Their eggs became white caterpillars, which fed upon the roots of the corn, and destroyed the future harvest. Cold weather destroyed them by millions." Philos. Trans. v. 19, p. 71. Thoms. Hist. Roy. Soc. p. 92.

↑ Dr. Picknell details the case of a girl in France, who emitted the larvæ of beetles, the blaps mortisaga; and twelve days after a green insect, with wings, that flew away She continued to discharge others. Some were an inch and a half long, very vigorous, and lived a month in a box. He reckoned 400 of what he saw. Seven of them were the tenebris moliter, or meal worm. The complaint continued for some time. He thinks above 1,300 larvæ came away in all; and of these 60 were winged insects; so that they changed, matured, and bred in her stomach. The cause was, that by an old woman's advice, she had drank water saturated with the earth of two catholic priests' graves. The blaps live in churchyards..... Dr. Gaspard mentions, in the epidemy in 1826, a man who emitted three caterpillars. Another, a countryman, voided a yellow caterpillar, and asked if it could come from some apples he had eaten. In another case one was shown to Buffon, that was brownish, with sixteen legs; it refused leaves, and would only eat meat recently masticated. Bull. Un. 1830. v. 11, p. 213- 15.

spiders which have the power of floating or moving in air.* But creation is full of analogies, pointing to one general originator, and linking all sentient things into one great family of related fellow-creatures.

On the flying spider, see Bull. Un. 1830. v. 8, p. 345, 6..... A species raise themselves in the air by their gossamer threads. Ib. 1829. v. 7, p. 133,4. ...See also the "Natural Hist. of Insects" in the Family Library, No. VIII. ... ... The actual truth is, perhaps, that which Leuwenhoeck observed; "the animal has the power of darting out a very long thread, not attached to any thing, by means of which it is wafted about in the air, where it often remains a considerable time." Thomson's Hist. R. Soc. p. 91, from Phil. Trans. v. 22, p. 867.

LETTER XVIII.

On the fossil remains of animals found in the rocks and strata of the earth. Those in the secondary strata of the marine classes. -II. The land quadrupeds of the tertiary beds.-Nothing incon sistent with the Mosaic cosmogony.

MY DEAR SON,

THE other topics which remain to complete my objects in these letters will not allow me to detail to you all the facts that ought to be known and considered with respect to the fossil remains of animals which the rocks and strata of our earth contain, and which human labour or curiosity has disclosed, in modern times, to our view. To do full justice to the subject, the right theory of our geology ought to be first well settled. But the diversities of opinion which still prevail, show that this is impossible at present. We know enough for ingenious speculation, and also for hesitation and doubt; and we are from time to time acquir ing more elucidating knowledge, which is leading the intelligent inquirers, who are pursuing this interesting subject, to better reasoning, and to more just conclusions. But we seem to have arrived at that point in which further discoveries from our mineralogical investigations become necessary, before any true system can be established as to the formation of our globe. Scientific men have traced its constituent substances to sixty or more simpler bodies, which at present rank as elements, because they are not yet further decomposable; and these appear to have constituted our primordial rocks. But there are abundant reasons for surmising that they are not the primitive elements of material nature; and therefore until they can be resolved into the particles or substances which are so, we shall not attain those perceptions of the original composition of our multifarious earth, which will present the deciding and satisfactory truth. We must know what silica, alumina, magnesia, lime, carbon, iron, and the other metals and primitive components of the minerals intrinsically are, before we can accurately discern the process of the suc cession, the causations, the agencies, the laws, and the principles, on which the primary and secondary masses were originally formed. The acquisition of this further

G g

information would have been thought impossible in the last century. But human sagacity and industry are now exploring what is unknown, so perseveringly, and so successfully, that every month may bring us the information, that some diligent analyst, in some country or other, may be drawing from nature those great secrets of her primordial chemistry, which have hitherto been impervious and inaccessible. In this state of unsatisfactory ignorance and uncertainty, it will be sufficient to notice the organic remains which have been disclosed, with a few brief remarks on the subterraneous structure which contains them.

The ground we tread upon, and from which vegetation now springs, is not the primitive surface of the earth. It is the upper part of the last series of strata which have been deposited upon and around it, and which is now most commonly denominated the TERTIARY formations. By this term, the series of subterraneous beds, down to the chalk rocks, are named and known; and they are manifestly more recent than the masses below them.* These are considered by many, and, I think, justly, to have been formed at the period of the deluge, from the fragments and ruins of the earth's previous surface, amid the concussions and perturbations of that general catastrophe. But, however this be, these tertiary beds are clearly distinguishable from the more ancient, and are treated of as a class by themselves, different from what preceded them in position, appearance, fossils, and composition.

Below these occur another great series of various rocks, of a stratified and sedimentary nature, which have been called transition, or intermediary, and upper and lower secondary. But to all these, the general term, secondary,

• Conyb. Geol. Introd. v-vii. M. de Serres Geogn. p. xcii.

† M. Dufresnoy calls the beds that have been deposited on the exten sive chalk formation "Terrains Tertianes." Bull. Un. 1831. No. 4, p. 38.

"We find a mantle, as it were, of earth and sand indifferently covering all the solid strata, and evidently derived from some convulsion which has lacerated and partially broken up those strata, inasmuch as its materials are, demonstratively, fragments of the subjacent rocks, rounded by attrition." "Hence they must be assigned to the last violent and general catastrophe which the earth's surface has undergone." Mr. Conybeare, therefore, calls them diluvial. Out. Geol. p. 4.

+ M. Marcel de Serres' "Geognosie des Terrains Tertianes," 1829, is devoted to this class of the earth's strata, and to their animal fossils.

$"Transition or intermediate rocks, cover those of the primary class, and are distinguished as the lowest rocks, in which the fossil remains of