The grubs
found in the snows of Media are large and white; and all such grubs
are little disposed to motion. In Cyprus, in places where copper-ore
is smelted, with heaps of the ore piled on day after day, an animal is
engendered in the fire, somewhat larger than a blue bottle fly,
furnished with wings, which can hop or crawl through the fire. And the
grubs and these latter animals perish when you keep the one away
from the fire and the other from the snow. Now the salamander is a
clear case in point, to show us that animals do actually exist that
fire cannot destroy; for this creature, so the story goes, not only
walks through the fire but puts it out in doing so.
On the river Hypanis in the Cimmerian Bosphorus, about the
time of the summer solstice, there are brought down towards the sea by
the stream what look like little sacks rather bigger than grapes,
out of which at their bursting issues a winged quadruped. The insect
lives and flies about until the evening, but as the sun goes down it
pines away, and dies at sunset having lived just one day, from which
circumstance it is called the ephemeron.
As a rule, insects that come from caterpillars and grubs are
held at first by filaments resembling the threads of a spider's web.
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