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COMPARATIVE ANATOMY. 267
caught. In order to surprise their prey while asleep in
the night, owls fly out provided with enormous pupils
which enable them to see in the dark, and with very soft
feathers to make their flight noiseless and thus permit
them to fall unawares upon their sleeping prey without
awakening it by their movements. Silurus, gymnotus and
torpedo bring a complete electric apparatus into the world
with them, in order to stun their prey before they can
reach it ; and also as a defence against their own pursuers.
For wherever anything living breathed, there immediately
1
came another to devour it,
and every animal is in a way
down to the minutest
designed and calculated throughout,
detail, for the purpose of destroying some other animal.
Ichneumons, for instance, among insects, lay their eggs in
the bodies of certain caterpillars and similar larvce, in
which they bore holes with their stings, in order to ensure
nourishment for their future brood. Now those kinds which
feed on larvce that crawl about freely, have short stings not
more than about one-third of an inch long, whereas pimpla
manifestator, which feeds upon chelostoma maxillosa, whose
larvce lie hidden in old trees at great depth and are not
accessible to it, has a sting two inches long ; and the sting
of the ichneumon strobillce which lays its eggs in larvcp,
dwelling in fir-cones, is nearly as long. With these stings
they penetrate to the larva in which they bore a hole
and deposit one egg, whose product subsequently de-
1 Animated by the feeling of this truth, Kobert Owen, after passing
in review the numerous and often very large Australian fossile marsupialia
sometimes as big as the rhinoceros came as early as 1842 to the
conclusion, that a large beast of prey must have contemporaneously
existed. This conclusion was afterwards confirmed, for in 1846 he
received part of the fossile skull of a beast of prey of the size of the lion,
which he named thylacoleo, i.e. lion with a pouch, since it is also a
marsupial. (See the
"
is an article on Palaeontology,"
"
" Times of the 19th of May, 1866, where there
with an account of Owen s lecture
at the Government School of Mines. [Add. to 3rd ed.]