Theater of Insects

...from east to west, following the movement of the Sun, never ceasing to turn it for 28 days, until it is fit to be buried for the production of offspring, after the space of a lunar month, which nature has assigned for the formation of the worm—which is finally to depart into a winged creature—and its exclusion. Note here that the male can have prolific seed without the help of a female, and can generate by itself, with the intervention of the putrefaction of suitable matter in a convenient matrix (even one not animal). But (which crowns all the meditations of a Christian man and carries him aloft), weigh how the silkworm builds its tomb for itself, impervious within with woven work more compact, in which the worm appears to die within itself, and is reborn by a prodigious Metamorphosis as a butterfly, a more noble animal, which seeks the sky with the rowing of its wings, whereas before its burial it lived as a sordid reptile attached to the earth and glued to the food of a leaf. See if the little creature of the locust kind, feeding on the stalks of trees, consumed by the utmost thinness (which the Gauls of Narbonne call Pregadiou from its gesture of praying) may teach men to stretch their suppliant palms to the sky, and admonish them to observe the rite of the righteous in offering prayers to the Lord. What of the greater Indian one-horned beetle, which, born without a mother (in the manner of others of its kind), dies, and resurfaces afterward from its own rot, like the Phoenix? Finally, what do you think of flies, which, if you bury them in warm ash after they have been submerged in water for many hours, you will recall to life again? I do not doubt, by Hercules, but that among these holiday thoughts (the object of which will seem less festive to other men, who are amousos kai aphilosophos unrefined and unphilosophical), your mind rises to its origin, and with eyes fixed on the sky you exclaim, "Well done, O God!" and with the divine Psalmist you pay a song to the author of Nature.

How magnified are your works, O Lord. You have made all things in wisdom. The earth is filled with your possession.

There will thus be something for which I congratulate myself, from the fact that although your long series of years has thus far been a continuous act of philosophizing, nevertheless, through the rare supplement of this honorable gift, I may have offered you a new opportunity for meditation that is no less solid and useful than it is pleasant and curious. Allow, therefore, a friendly hand to introduce into your Library the offspring of the most learned Mouffetus Moffet, now at last brought to light, and assign it a place worthy of parent and child among so many volumes with which you have furnished the shelves of your Museum. Besides the enumerated goods that will accrue to you from this, and the most ample interest you will gain from the hours given to reading the work (if it is permitted to joke), your estate will also not lack benefit, lest your own profit seem neglected here: In these pages you will find what will drive away the plague of your delights,