MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Issue 125, 3 April 1879, Page 2

MENTAL LIFE BELOW THE HUMAN.

(From the Ponn Monthly.) Autenrieth, tli& celebrated German naturalist, has described for us the metamorphoses through which pass the individuals of a species of butterfly named by him Nachtpfauenauge. Its grub-life, like all of the same genus, is one of unbroken monotony and dulness, The sum-total of its experiences consists in gorging on leafpulp, crawling under cover when it rains, and now and then casting its skin, It has no home-life, its parents having died before it began to live, It has no companionship ;it seeks none. This sluggish, solitary, gormandising, creeping worm is at a certain set time suddenly arrested by the' electric thrill of some new strange life, It stops eating, and, under a mysterious, prophetic impulse, commences to weave about its body, out of delicate threads thatissuefrom it, a silken palace of doubleroof, so ingeniously braced by innumerable supports that it both withstands violent attack from without, and yields to the almost spirit touch from within, of that most fragile of fairies which, out of the homely and prone body of the grub, rises erewhile on brilliantly-tinted wings, to flutter and float like a stray bit of sunset on a summer's evening zephyr. By this unique contrivance this little creature escapes, on the one hand from outside violence, and, on the other, from the sad fate of self-burial. Is it conceivable that that this worm possesses such intimate acquaintance with the occult laws of merchanics as this piece of work presupposes —that it has acquired by its own exertions this masterful skill in architecture, or that it really discerns with clear prophetic vision, approaching changes in its form, its capacities, its .needs, and its destiny ? It has had no instructor, no personal experience,, no working model, This is its first attempt, yet it bears the stamp of absolute perfection. The butterflies of other species, when the hour is ripe for tliem to issue from their cocoons, secrete a fluid that acts on the silk as a solvent. This grub, as if conscious from the first that such power will never be given it, constructs its case on widely different principles. To affirm that it inherits this knowledge, skill, and prescience does not in the least clear up the mystery—it only carries the inquiry further back, for the first grub must have been equally able to spina similar cocoon on first trial, or it never could have developed into a butterfly and become the progenitor of a species,