It has been calculated that a mosquito or a gnat moves its wings between four and five hundred times a second.

Now the scientific dissection of such an insect, under the microscope, justifies the opinion that the insect must be conscious of each beat of the wings--just as a man feels that he lifts his arm or bends his head every time that the action is performed.

A man can not even imagine the consciousness of so short an interval of time as the five-hundredth part of one second.

But insect consciousness can be aware of such intervals; and a single day of life might well appear to the gnat as long as the period of a month to a man.

Indeed, we have reason to suppose that to even the shortest-lived insect life does not appear short at all; and that the ephemeral may actually, so far as felling is concerned, live as long as a man--although its birth and death does occur between the rising and the setting of the sun.
We might suppose that bees would form a favourite subject of poetry, especially in countries where agriculture is practised upon such a scale as in England.