World, noted women from India and Sri Lanka, who kept 1 1/2 inch long, iridescent greenish coppery beetles of the species Chrysochroa ocellata as pets. These living jewels were worn on festive occasions, probably with a small chain attached to one leg anchored to the clothing to prevent escape. Afterwards, the insects were bathed, fed, and housed in decorative cages. Living jeweled beetles have also been worn and kept as pets in Mexico. Butterflies Butterflies have long inspired humans with their life cycle, colour, and ornate patterns. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov was also a renowned butterfly expert. He published and illustrated many butterfly species, stating: "I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were games of intricate enchantment and deception." It was the aesthetic complexity of insects that led Nabokov to reject natural selection. The naturalist Ian MacRae writes of butterflies: ". . . the animal is at once awkward, flimsy, strange, bouncy in flight, yet beautiful and immensely sympathetic; it is painfully transient, albeit capable of extreme migrations and transformations. Images and phrases such as "kaleidoscopic instabilities," "oxymoron of similarities," "rebellious rainbows," "visible darkness" and "souls of stone" have much in common.They bring together the two terms of a conceptual contradiction, thereby facilitating the mixing of what should be discrete and mutually exclusive categories . . . In positing such questions, butterfly science, an inexhaustible, complex, and finely nuanced field, becomes not unlike the human imagination, or the field of literature itself. In the natural history of the animal, we begin to sense its literary and artistic possibilities." The photographer Kjell Sanded spent 25 years documenting all 26 characters of the Latin alphabet using the wing patterns of butterflies and moths as "The Butterfly Alphabet". Dragonflies For some Native American tribes, dragonflies represent swiftness and activity; for the Navajo, they symbolize pure water. They are a common motif in Zuni pottery; stylized as a double-barred cross, they appear in Hopi rock art and on Pueblo necklaces. Images of dragonflies are common in Art Nouveau, especially in jewellery designs. Flies Musca depicta ("painted fly" in Latin) is a depiction of a fly as a conspicuous element of various paintings. This feature was widespread in 15th and 16th centuries paintings and its presence may be explained as a jest; to symbolize the worthiness of even the smallest of God's creations;