s vanished
for one week, bow many millions of living creatures owe their birth to
his death? What countless swarms of insects have risen from that one
carcase!--creatures which never could have been brought into existence
were it not for the presence of one dead body which has received and
hatched the deposited eggs of millions that otherwise would have
remained unvivified.

Not a tree falls, not a withered flower droops to the ground, not a
fruit drops from the exhausted bough, but it is instantly attacked by
the class of insect prepared by Nature for its destruction. The white
ant scans a lofty tree whose iron-like timber and giant stem would seem
to mock at his puny efforts; but it is rotten at the core and not a
leaf adorns its branches, and in less than a year it will have fallen
to the earth a mere shell; the whole of the wood will have been
devoured.

Rottenness of all kinds is soon carried from the face of the land by
the wise arrangements of Nature for preserving the world from plagues
and diseases, which the decaying and unconsumed bodies of animals and
vegetables would otherwise engender.

How beautiful are all the laws of Nature! how perfect in their details!
Allow that the great duty of the insect tribe is to cleanse the earth
and atmosphere from countless impurities noxious to the human race, how
great a plague would our benefactors themselves become were it not for
the various classes of carnivorous insects who prey upon them, and are
in their turn the prey of others! It is a grand principle of continual
strife, which keeps all and each down to their required level.

What a feast for an observant mind is thus afforded in a tropical
country! The variety and the multitude of living things are so great
that a person of only ordinary observation cannot help acquiring a
tolerable knowledge of the habits of some of the most interesting
classes. In the common routine of daily life they are continually in
his view, and even should he have no taste for the study of Nature and
her productions, still one prevailing characteristic of the insect
tribe must impress itself upon his mind. It is the natural instinct
not simply of procreating their species, but of laying by a provision
for their expected offspring. What a lesson to mankind! what an
example to the nurtured mind of mail from one of the lowest classes of
living things!

Here we see no rash matrimonial engagements; no penniless lovers
selfishly an