A paper on “The Transformation of Insects” was read by Mr. Walter Roberts.

Insects to the popular mind are not always very interesting creatures. If any interest be shown to them, it is as to the best means of effecting their destruction, for they are too often regarded as useless pests, to be ruthlessly destroyed at every opportunity.

Science, however, by the aid of the microscope and the patient investigations of the naturalist has revealed to us in the insect world forms of beauty, exquisite colourings, wonderous structures, even skill and instinct not surpassed by animals of the higher organisation, while it is also seen that they fill no unimportant part in the economy of nature. The natural world presents to us many strange phenomena but none more wonderful than the metamorphoses or transformation of insects.

However rudimentary our knowledge of the habits of insects, we know that they undergo certain changes and have several distinct states and stages of existence, and yet we are informed by so high an authority as Darwin that as recently as 50 years ago the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of San Fernando, in Chili, arrested a certain M. Renous on a charge of witchcraft because he kept some caterpillars which actually turned into butterflies.

It has, however, been long known that insects quit the egg in a very different form from that they ultimately assume, passing, in fact, through four different states – the egg, larva, pupa, and imago, or perfect insect. Swammerdam held, and his theory has been adapted by other eminent naturalists, that the larva contained within itself the germ of the future butterfly enclosed in what will be the case of the pupa. Thus, he says, the caterpillar should not be called a simple but a compound animal, and that we should rather term their changes developments and not transformations.

This is pronounced by Sir John Lubbock to be a mistake, but he admits that if you examine a larva just before it is full grown, you may discover the future pupa, and if you examine a pupa about to disclose a butterfly, you will find the future insect, soft indeed, but easily recognisable, within the pupa skin. The metamorphoses of a variety of insects were explained and illustrated by drawings,

The meeting closed with an interesting discussion and exhibition of specimens under the microscopes.