Page:Micrographia - or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses with observations and inquiries thereupon.djvu/286

Rh out, or if you find no passage, you may, by breaking or cutting the Gall, find in the middle of it a small cavity, and in it a small body, which does plainly enough yet retain a shape, to manifest it once to have been a Worm, though it dy'd by a too early reparation from the Oak on which it grew, its navel-string, as 'twere, being broken off from the leaf or branch by which the Globular body that invelop'd it, received its nourishment from the Oak.

And indeed, if we consider the great care of the Creator in the dispensations of his providences for the propagation and increase of the race, not onely of all kind of Animals, but even of Vegetables, we cannot chuse but admire and adore him for his Excellencies, but we shall leave off to admire the creature, or to wonder at the strange kind of acting in several Animals, which seem to favour so much of reason; it seeming to me most manifest, that those are but actings according to their structures, and such operations as such bodies, so compos'd, must necessarily, when there are such and such circumstances concurring, perform: thus, when we find Flies swarming, about any piece of flesh that does begin a little to ferment; Butterflies about Colworts, and several other leaves, which will serve to hatch and nourish their young; Gnats, and several other Flies about the Waters, and marishy places, or any other creatures, seeking and placing their Seeds in convenient repositories, we may, if we attentively consider and examine it, find that there are circumstances sufficient, upon the supposals of the excellent contrivance of their machine, to excite and force them to act after such or such a manner; those steams that rise from these several places may, perhaps, set several parts of these little Animals at work, even as in the contrivance of killing a Fox or Wolf with a Gun, the moving of a string, is the death of the Animal; for the Beast, by moving the flesh that is laid to entrap him, pulls the string which moves the trigger, and that lets go the Cock which on the steel strikes certain sparks of fire which kindle the powder in the pann, and that presently flies into the barrel, where the powder catching fire rarifies and drives out the bullet which kills the Animal; in all which actions, there is nothing of intention or ratiocination to be ascrib'd either to the Animal or Engine, but all to the ingeniousness of the contriver.

But to return to the more immediate consideration of our Gnat: We have in it an Instance, not usual or common, of a very strange amphibious creature, that being a creature that inhabits the Air, does yet produce a creature, that for some time lives in the water as a Fish, though afterward (which is as strange) it becomes an inhabitant of the Air, like its Sire, in the form of a Fly. And this, methinks, does prompt me to propose certain conjectures, as Queries, having not yet had sufficient opportunity and leisure to answer them my self from my own Experiments or Observations.

And the first is, Whether all those things that we suppose to be bred from corruption and putrifaction, may not be rationally suppos'd to have their origination as natural as these Gnats, who, 'tis very probable, were first dropt into this Water, in the form of Eggs. Those Seeds or Rh