and wonderful instincts. In ascending this scale of being, while
there is a progress upwards, the beetles, for instance, being higher
than the bugs and grasshoppers; and the butterflies and moths, on the
whole, being more highly organized than the flies; and while we see the
hymenopterous saw-flies, with their larvae mimicking so closely the
caterpillars of the butterflies, in the progress from the saw-flies up
to the bees we behold a gradual loss of the lower saw-fly characters in
the Cynips and Chalcid flies, and see in the sand-wasps and true wasps
a constant and accelerating likeness to the bee form. Yet this
continuity of improving organizations is often broken, and we often see
insects which recall the earlier and more elementary forms.

[Illustration: 184. Male Stylops.]

Again, going back of the larval period, and studying the insect in the
egg, we find that nearly all the insects yet observed agree most
strikingly in their mode of growth, so that, for instance, the earlier
stages of the germ of a bee, fly or beetle, bear a remarkable
resemblance to each other, and suggest again, more forcibly than when we
examine the larval condition, that a common design or pattern at first
pervades all. In the light of the studies of Von Baer, of Lamarck and
Darwin, should we be content to stop here, or does this ideal archetype
become endowed with life and have a definite existence, becoming the
ancestral form of all insects, the prototype which gave birth to the
hundreds of thousands of insect forms which are now spread over our
globe, just as we see daily happens where a single aphis may become the
progenitor of a million offspring clustering on the same tree? Is there
not something more than analogy in the two things, and is not the same
life-giving force that evolves a million young Aphides from the germ
stock of a single Aphis in a single season, the same in kind with the
production of the living races of insects from a primeval ancestor? When
we see the Aphis giving origin in one season to successive generations,
the individuals of which may be counted by the million, it is no less
mysterious than that other succession of forms of insect life which has
peopled the globe during the successive chapters of its history. While
we see in one case the origin of individual forms, and cannot explain
what it is that starts the life in the germ and so unerringly guides the
course of the growing embryo, it is illogical to deny th