of creatures were also introduced in the original establishment of things, whose
Book III 229 lust involved in fornication or in the immoderate use, or rather misuse, of marriage.
On the creation of insects
14, 22. There is also a real question about the creation of the minutest animals, whether they were created in the original establishment of things, or from the putrefaction consequent upon material things being perishable. Most of them, you see, are either bred from the sores of living bodies, or from garbage and effluents, or from the rotting of corpses; some also from rotten wood and grass, some from rotten fruit; and we cannot possibly say that there are any of them of which God is not the creator. All things, after all, have in them a certain worth or grace of nature, each of its own kind, so that in these minute creatures there is even more for us to wonder at as we observe them, and so to praise the almighty craftsman for them more rapturously than ever. lndeed he made all things in the Wisdom who reachesfrom end to endand sweetly disposes all things (Wis 8:1), and who does not leave even the very last and least ofthings without due shape or form, things that disintegrate in accordance with their natural properties, and whose disintegration fills us with horror, punished as we are by our own mortality. No, she creates animals whose bodies are as tiny as can be, but whose senses are so sharp that ifwe pay close attention we are more amazed at the agile flight of a fly than at the stamina of a sturdy mule on the march; and the coopera tive labors oftiny ants strike us as far more wonderful than the colossal loads that can be carried by camels.
23. But as I said, the question is whether we are to believe that these smallest of creatures were also introduced in the original establishment of things, whose creation is recounted in this series of six days, or later on from the consequent disintegration of perishable bodies. And it can indeed be said that the tiniest things which spring from the waters or the earth were created then; among them one may include without absurdity those that are born of the vegetation which appeared when the earth blossomed. Now this preceded the making of the lumi naries as well as of the animals, and furthermore its roots make it a kind ofexten sion of the earth. So these creatures, coming into being on the day when the dry land appeared, should be understood as supplementing the furnishing of the habitation rather than as belonging to the number of its inhabitants.
But as for the rest which are generated from the bodies of animals, especially dead ones, it would be quite ridiculous to say that they were created at the same time as the animals themselves were, unless possibly there was some natural tendency in all animated bodies, so that they already had seeded and threaded into them beforehand, as it were, the first beginnings of the future animalcules, which were going to arise, by an inexpressible arrangement, in their various