fined the
outward organ of the identity, or at least of the indifference, of the
real and ideal. But as the calcareous residuum of the lowest class
approaches to the nature of horn in the snail, so the cumbrous shell of
the snail has been transformed into polished and moveable plates of
defensive armour in the insect. Thus, too, the same power of progressive
individuation articulates the tentacula of the polypus and holothuria into
antennae; thereby manifesting the full emersion and eminency of
irritability as a power which acts in, and gives its own character to,
that of reproduction. The least observant must have noticed the
lightning-like rapidity with which the insect tribes devour and eliminate
their food, as by an instinctive necessity, and in the least degree for
the purposes of the animal's own growth or enlargement. The same
predominance of irritability, and at the same time a new start in
individuation, is shown in the reproductive power as generation. There is
now a regular projection, _ab intra ad extra_, for which neither sprouts
nor cuttings can any longer be the substitutes. We have not space for
further detail; but there is one point too strikingly illustrative and
even confirmative of the proposed system, to be omitted altogether. We
mean the curious fact, that the same characteristic tendency, _ad extra_,
which in the males and females of certain insect tribes is realized in the
functions of generation, conception, and parturiency, manifests and
expands itself in the _sexless_ individuals (which are always in this case
the great majority of the species), as instincts of art, and in the
construction of works completely detached and inorganic; while the
geometric regularity of these works, which bears an analogy to
crystallization, is demonstrably no more than the necessary result of
uniform action in a compressed multitude.

Again, as the insect world, averaging the whole, comes nearest to plants,
(whose very essence is reproduction,) in the multitude of their germs; so
does it resemble plants in the sufficiency of a single impregnation for
the evolution of myriads of detached lives. Even so, the metamorphoses of
insects, from the egg to the maggot and caterpillar, and from these,
through the nympha and aurelia into the perfect insect, are but a more
individuated and intenser form of a similar transformation of the plant
from the seed-leaflets, or cotyledons, through the stalk, the leaves, and
the calyx