Chapter II: The Insect World (1)

STRAIGHT-WINGED INSECTS

(_Orthoptera_)

When children play with pebbles on the beach, they often put the red ones in one group, the white ones in another. It is much the same with men, they try to put the things that are alike together, and in the bewildering multitude of shapes and forms and habits with which the insect specialists have had to deal, they catch at any similarity, and put together in one group a lot of creatures which are only alike in a few particulars.

In the straight-winged order of orthoptera they have put the creatures which have four wings, the front pair being leather-like and smaller than the other pair, which latter fold up like a fan. They are also all equipped with strong biting jaws. Bugs often look like them, but bugs have beaks and never jaws.

It is in this order that are found nearly all of the true song insects, at least so far as human ears can tell. The grasshoppers, the katydids and crickets are the great music makers of the insect world, although it is true that there is one, perhaps the loudest, shrillest singer of them all which is classified among the bugs, the lyreman, or cicada, one of the species of which is known as the seventeen-year locust.

When we talk of the hum of insects we do not often stop to think that it is quite a different thing in general from their song. Most insects in their flight, providing that their wings move fast enough, make some kind of a noise. The humming of the bee, the buzzing of the house fly and mosquito and the whirring of the clumsy beetle's wings are quite a different thing from the conscious song of the katydid to its mate, or the singing of the cricket on the hearth.

Of course it is impossible for us to be quite sure that there is not a host of insects who have means of making some kind of a noise which is so high up in the scale of noises as to be too faint for us to hear.

THE KING GRASSHOPPER

(_Hippiscus sp._)

As this young king grasshopper stands looking so inquiringly at one with his varicolored eyes, each of which is composed of hundreds of facets, I cannot help thinking that he represents a creature quite as fascinating and actually more dangerous than the East African monsters of our school geographies.

Perhaps it is perfectly natural, but it does not seem right, that so little emphasis should be laid in our histories upon the terrible struggles of man with his insect enemies. The time will come when we shall recognize this warfare, when we shall realize how much of human happiness lies buried on the battlefields of our struggle against the insect hordes.

The members of one species of this great family can sail for a thousand miles before the wind, and they go in such numbers that they make a cloud 2,000 square miles in extent.

They multiply in such numbers as to baffle all calculation, and every living green thing for thousands of square miles disappears down their throats, leaving the country they infest desolate. The great famine of Egypt, mentioned in the book of Exodus, the grasshopper years of Kansas, which ruined thousands of families on our plains, and more recent devastations in Argentina and South Africa are examples of the tremendous effects which the migratory locusts have had upon the happiness of mankind.

The famines which have followed in their wake have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings and ruined the lives of millions of others. We have become so accustomed to the idea that the farmer must expect to lose his crop every few years from the devastations of these beasts, that we have not yet realized that it would be profitable to spend vast sums of money in learning how to fight them.

In the evolution of the race, this change will come about, and I feel that no honor is too great to bestow upon the American entomologists who have led the world in its fight with these enemies of the human race. Some day these quiet, resourceful, far-sighted men of knowledge will take their places beside the organizers of industry and the warriors of mankind in the hero worship of our boys and girls.

A BABY GRASSHOPPER

A baby creature, scarcely two weeks since it issued from a grasshopper egg, and yet with two moults behind it--two bright green baby skins cast off!

Imagine looking forward, as this baby creature does, to the day when its internal air sacs shall be filled with air and the pads on its back have grown so long and parchment-like that it can leave its hopping, terrestrial existence and sail away across the fields. Until that time, however, it must be content with its six spiny legs, pushing its way among the blades of grass, tasting everything green and eating what it likes, and hiding from its enemies when moulting time comes round.

A young chick finds itself shut inside the eggshell and must work its way out alone, but the young grasshoppers when they hatch out find themselves--the whole nestful--shut in a hardened case in the ground made by their mother, and it takes half a dozen of them working together to dislodge the lid which shuts them in.

Unlike the beetles and the butterflies, which spring full-fledged from the metamorphosis of a caterpillar, the grasshopper comes to be a winged creature by slow stages, each one a little more advanced than the former, with wings a little better developed. The baby grasshopper is essentially a small, wingless adult, and not a grub or larva in the ordinary sense.

A YOUNG GRASSHOPPER'S SKELETON

When the young grasshopper emerges from the egg, it is very small indeed--a wingless, helpless little creature, all legs and mouth.

It passes through successive ages, or stages, as they are called, each one of which is separated from the other by a moult or casting of its outer shell.

These moults take place at fixed periods, and as the insect finds itself restrained by its firm, inelastic skeleton, a longitudinal rent occurs along the back, and the insect, soft and dangerously helpless, struggles out of the old skin, inclosed in a new but delicate cuticle, which takes some time to harden and color up.

Some people go to great trouble and expense to keep the baby portraits and even the baby shoes, and I cannot help wondering whether a full-grown grasshopper, leading a life in the open air, is ever interested in observing the baby skeletons which show its five stages of terrestrial life.

What an interesting collection could be made of these insects' skeletons, photographed large enough so that we could see and study them!

THE GRASSHOPPER IS GOOD TO EAT

How much mere prejudice controls us! Whence came our aversion to the spotless, winged grasshopper as food and our fondness for the flesh of the wallowing swine? We thoughtlessly pass on to our children the idea that certain things are not good to eat while others are, and so, although the grasshopper has been eaten for centuries by millions of people, even by the ancient Assyrians, and is today one of the candied delicacies of Japan, our American boys, hungry as they always are, have not yet caught them to cook over their campfires.

The spiny legs deter us, perhaps, and yet, when one thinks that we eat up all of the soft-shelled crabs, sardines, reed birds and some other delicacies, that seems to be no argument at all against the pasture fed and fattened locust of our summer time.

In Barbary, according to Miss Margaret Morley, the recipe in common use is to boil them for half an hour, remove the heads and wings and legs, sprinkle with salt and then fry them and season with vinegar to taste.

The Maoris of New Zealand, it is said, prefer them to the pigeons which they raise.

The Bedouins bake then in a heated pit in the ground, much as a woodsman cooks his beans, and later dries them in the sun, then grinds them to powder and makes a kind of gruel, or else he eats them without grinding, simply removing the legs and wings with his fingers as one would the shell of a shrimp.

Some people say they taste like the yolk of a hard-boiled egg, while others compare them in flavor to prawns.

Now, whether all the different kinds are good or not, and which are best to eat are questions which the American boys most find out for themselves--the girls, it is assumed, will take no part in this new field of cookery!

Should any boy desire to dip into this vast subject and become an acridophagus it would take him back in his study to the hieroglyphics on some of the oldest monuments of the human race and be a most fascinating subject.

A GRASSHOPPER'S EAR IS UNDER ITS WING

(_Dissosteira carolina_, Linn.)

If you raise the wing of a full-grown grasshopper and look behind its big fat thigh, you will see a strange hole into its body. This is supposed to be its ear, but what it hears and what it does not hear, who can tell?

When on a warm summer day you hear a male grasshopper chirping, for the males alone can sing, you can think that somewhere nearby, perhaps with wings lifted to hear the song better, sits some attentive female whose ears are tuned to catch the plaintiveness of this courting song.

THE GRASSHOPPER'S HEARING ORGAN

(_Dissosteira carolina_, Linn.)

As we grow older and certain sounds which we heard in childhood with the greatest ease become harder for us to hear and are finally lost to as altogether, we begin to appreciate the relative character of sound. Some boys can hear the faintest twitter of the shyest song bird in the tree tops, while others strain their ears in vain to catch its note.

Is it any wonder then that men should be puzzled to know just what the true grasshopper hears? They know there are males of certain species which sing so loud they make our ears ache, but there are others whose noises, if they make any, have never yet been heard by human ears, and yet they all have these ears. They believe, too, that there are certain sounds the grasshopper can hear without the use of these special ears.

So whether this strange organ furnishes a special means by which the males and females find each other or not, and what part it has played throughout the centuries in the development of this marvelous form of living matter, are things that man may be a long time yet in finding out.

In the photograph it lies to the left, a dark kidney-shaped opening with the ear drum membrane at an angle just inside its rim. It has a well-formed tympanum, and nerves and muscles of a complex nature.

THE SHORT-WINGED GREEN LOCUST

(_Dicromorpha viridis_, Scudd.)

Whether this creature has a personality or not may be forever extremely difficult for humans to decide. Its eyes that look like cows' eyes really cast hundreds of images on a special kind of brain, so different from our own that we cannot understand it, and then, besides these great big eyes, it has three others scarcely visible in the picture. Its short-ringed horns are not horns at all, but sense organs of so complicated a nature that we do not yet know certainly whether they are organs of smell or not, and it is supposed that they may be the seat of sense organs that we humans do not have.

The jumping legs of the creature are filled with powerful muscles, which, when they expand, can hurl it through the air and enable it to escape from its enemies. On the inner side of the femur is a musical instrument, a row of hard, bead-like projections, which are very highly developed in the males, but not at all in the females. When one of the veins of the upper wing, which is prominent and has a sharp knife edge, is scraped over these projections, a musical sound is made by the vibration of the whole wing. It would seem to be the case, as with so many of the birds, that only the male can sing, the female being mute.

THE KATYDID

(_Scudderia sp._)

How marvelously equipped such a creature as this is to live! The great eyes, with many facets, enable it to see by night as well as by day. Its long, slender antennæ catch the faintest odor, and probably are sensitive to a host of perfumes that we do not know. In the front of each fore leg, just below the knee, is a dark, sunken area, the ear, with which it can probably hear sounds too faint for our ears, and by moving them can tell from which direction the sounds come. Its long muscular legs enable it to jump a hundred times its length whereas man can scarcely cover three times his length at a leap. Its wings not only enable it to fly well, but in the males are provided with an apparatus near their base for making a musical sound.

This sound is made by half opening the long green wings and closing them again rapidly.

The left wing bears a file on its inner surface near the base, while the other, the right wing, has a sharp knife edge on the outside just below the file on the left wing. In closing the wings together the knife edge scrapes across the file and makes at least one of the wings vibrate. While the wings are opening no sound is produced; as they close the characteristic sounds so like the words "Katy did" are made.

THE NARROW-WINGED KATYDID

(_Scudderia sp._)

If it is any comfort for sleepless ones to know it, the katydid is one of the noisiest creatures of its size in the world. It is only the males which call their "Katy-did, Katy-didn't, she did, she didn't," and they are calling to their mates.

There are people who prefer the noises of the street-cars to the noises of Nature, and who complain that the buzz of insect life on a summer evening makes them feel lonesome and unhappy, but to me half the mystery and charm of tropical life lies in the music of the night insects. Our southern states, with their tropical summers, have a wealth of insect life quite comparable to that of the tropics and vastly more varied than that of northern Europe.

The katydid is the greatest songster of this night choir and is a truly American species--as truly a thing to be proud of as the mocking-bird.

Lafcadio Hearn in his "Kusa Hibari" has put us in touch with the soul of a Japanese katydid, and if ours did not have quite so shrill a voice we too might domesticate him, but the idea of caging an American katydid as the Japanese do their tiny-voiced creatures will not, I fear, appeal to the average American citizen.

The male of this species sings sometimes by day as well as by night and has different calls for day and night.

The female lays her eggs in the edges of leaves, thrusting them in between the lower and upper cuticle, and from these hatch out the wingless, long-legged green creatures which are hopping everywhere about the grass in early summer.

They are borne for the summer season only, and with the frosts of winter they all die off. Nature seems to make just as complicated a being whether it is to last a score of minutes or a hundred years--one season or a hundred is all the same to her.

Just why the katydid should want to hear its own song some city people may wonder, but it is evident that he does, for just below each knee, on his foremost legs, is to be found a well-developed ear with a tympanum which probably vibrates much as ours do.

A YOUNG KATYDID

(_Scudderia sp._)

It is doubtful if there are any animals so largely legs as the young katydid. It cannot fly yet, for the wings upon its back are still too small to carry it through the air, but it can escape from its enemies by jumps which put those of a gazelle or a kangaroo to shame. The muscles in its legs are like our own muscles so far as can be determined, except that they are attached to projections on the inside of a skeleton which encases them all, instead of being attached to the outside of a skeleton which they themselves encase, so when a katydid jumps one cannot see the muscles move as one can those of a horse.

THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH

(_Gryllus pennsylvanicus_, Burm.)

Through the ages, who knows if not from the times of the cave-dwellers, this friendly visitor of the fireside has rubbed his rough wings together over his head and sung man to sleep. The European form seems quite as domesticated as the cat or dog, leading nowhere a truly wild life, and it may be questioned whether any living creature has become more a part of human life than the cricket on the hearth.

The carrying power of their song is extraordinary; there are species whose strident notes can be heard for a mile, although their little bodies are scarcely more than an inch in length. The males alone are musical, and it is reasonable to suppose, since the females have ears in their fore legs, that they are singing to their mates and not to mankind.

As one listens to their friendly song it is hard to appreciate what fighters they are among themselves, the larger ones even turning cannibals when food is scarce, although a glance at the photograph shows how well equipped they are for battle. Their great black eyes, only shinier black than their coal-black armored necks, their jointed palpi with which they feed themselves, their thick, leathery wings pressed against their sides like a box cover, and their strong, muscular, spiny hind legs, with which they jump a hundred times their own length, do none of them contribute to beauty, though quite in keeping with their armored war-horse appearance.

Two long, flexible circi protrude like tails behind, but the task of finding out what they are for has been too difficult for man. Perhaps the strange nerve-ending hairs which they bristle with may be sensitive to vibrations of the air, of which we yet know nothing.

THE GROUND CRICKET

Unlike its jet black relative of the fireside, the striped ground cricket forages by day on grassy slopes. It is a more omnivorous scavenger than the hyena, for it eats decaying plants as well as animals.

Its big brown eyes, which cover half its head, see, doubtless, many ways at once, and its long, whiplike antennæ, which it waves constantly as it springs through the grass, are believed to scent odors which are inconceivably faint, such as the odor of a blade of grass, a pebble, or a decaying leaf.

THE STONE OR CAMEL CRICKET

(_Ceuthophilus uhleri_, Scudd.)

It would not be a good idea to let the children think that creatures such as this were prowling round the house at night--that is, unless you assure them that it is only a harmless, tawny yellow stone-cricket from the shady woods, where it generally hides under stones and damp, decaying logs.

It seems strangely equipped for its night life, for it has antennæ as long as its body. I cannot help wondering if these help it to jump in the dark. Fabre, the great French entomologist, has tried, as others have, to find out just how the insects use their antennæ and what they are really for. He says at last, "our senses do not represent all the ways by which the animal puts himself in touch with that which is not himself; there are other ways of doing it, perhaps many, not even remotely analogous to those which we ourselves possess."

A MONSTER OF THE UNDERWORLD: THE MOLE CRICKET

(_Gryllotalpa borealis_, Burm.)

The creatures of the air which hide away their eggs that their larvæ may hatch out underneath the ground must reckon with this burrowing beast.

All his life long he tunnels beneath the ground from place to place. When you think of how long it would take you, even with the best tools, to dig a hole in the ground big enough to crawl into, you will get some idea of the power which these two front legs, four-pointed like a spading fork, must have, to enable such a creature to disappear into the ground in a few seconds as he does. These paws, proportionately many times more powerful than bears' paws, are snippers too, for moving back and forth behind them is a sharp-edged instrument which, like the shuttle-bar on a mowing machine, shears off the grass roots which interfere with the mole cricket's progress through the ground. The poor defenseless angleworms must fall an easy prey to such a foe as this!

Upon the first joint of each clumsy front leg, it has a narrow slit-like ear which is but faintly visible in the photograph. Can you imagine a male and female calling to each other through the long and winding passageways beneath the ground? Possibly they call to each other only in the night-time, on the rare occasions when they venture out above the ground.

He is a curious creature with eyes that are only rudimentary and a noxious smell that he emits if he is touched.

The female excavates a chamber near the surface of the ground and lays her eggs in it to be incubated by the sun's heat, as are most insects' eggs.

For some time it was supposed that both parents devoured their progeny, as many as 90 per cent being eaten up, but a French observer, Monsieur Decaux, has found that the male alone is the cannibal and the mother, far from doing this, watches over them and when they hatch she feeds the little ones with bits of plant roots, earthworms and the larvæ of various insects.

The discovery of one of these mole crickets is really an event. Most people see but one or two in all their lives. In Porto Rico, however, there is a form with longer wings which eats the roots of sugar cane, tobacco and other crops so that the "changa," as it is called, is considered the most serious insect pest in the island.

THE COCKROACH

(_Blatella germanica_, Linn.)

In carboniferous times this was a dominant creature, crawling over the giant club mosses and tree ferns which composed the marshy vegetation of the young world. Today it crawls over the cracker-box and makes its way through every crevice in the kitchen and is, of all the creatures of our houses, the most detested. This is the German cockroach, an importation from Europe, which has spread around the world, and which New Yorkers know as the croton bug.

Its long, spiny legs are built for the scurrying for which it is noted, while its slippery body enables it to squeeze through crevices and holes. It carries its head tucked under its body, as if looking for food, and its whiplike antennæ, always in motion, detect at long range the presence of anything edible which can be crammed into its capacious crop.

Housewives may be surprised to learn that a cockroach can live five years, and that it takes a year to develop to maturity from the egg. The female lays her eggs in a horny capsule, like a spectacle case, which she carries about with her until she is ready to deposit it in some suitable place. Later she returns to help her cockroach babies out of their shells.

Like the cricket, cockroaches love the night and shun the daylight. They cannot tolerate cold weather, and though there are 5,000 species they mostly inhabit the tropics, where they are the plague of domestic and ship life. It is said that "ships come into San Francisco from their long half-year voyages around the Horn with the sailors wearing gloves on their hands when asleep in their bunks in a desperate effort to save their fingernails from being gnawed off by the hordes of roaches which infest the whole ship." (Kellogg.)

And now a rumor comes to us that the cockroach carries cancer.

A DEMON FLY KILLER: THE PRAYING MANTIS

(_Paratenodera sinensis_, Sauss.)

Its spiny fore legs are built to hold the struggling flies, while, with its sharp jaws, it tears them to pieces much as a hawk or eagle holds its prey with its talons and tears it to shreds with its beak. It is wasteful, too, of its food, as wasteful as the sea lion, or the seal, throwing away the half-consumed carcass before it is finished and pursuing another victim.

So voracious is its appetite and so successful is it as a hunter that Doctor Slingerland of Cornell has introduced the eggs of a species of this mantis from Europe and distributed them among his friends in the Northern states as a beneficial insect.

To kill a praying mantis has been in Mohammedan countries almost as great a crime as it is to kill an albatross at sea, but this was not because it kills the swarms of flies so common in those lands, but rather because of the prayerful attitude made necessary by its fiercely spined and powerful front legs.

Its head is so loosely set on its long neck, or thorax, that it can move it from side to side with the greatest ease. Fabre declares that "the mantis is alone among all the insects in directing its attention to inanimate things. It inspects, it examines, it has almost a physiognomy."

Perhaps one is warranted in having a feeling of repugnance toward the mantis, for no other living creature has more horrible habits. There has always been something horrible about the cannibalism of human beings who ate their enemies killed in battle, but this has never seemed so revolting as the practice of the Fijians who killed members of their own tribe in cold blood for purposes of the cannibal feast. The female mantis goes a step farther than this, for she begins eating her lover even before the courtship is over.

There is nothing about the spiders, terrifying though they must appear to their defenseless prey, to indicate that they try consciously to frighten their victims, but the mantis, by spreading out its wings and curling up its abdomen, and raising its talon-tipped, spiny legs, seems to deliberately petrify with terror the cricket or grasshopper which comes within its reach.

THE ORDER OF THE BUGS

(_Hemiptera_)

How blind mankind must seem to the insect world! To look at beetles with their massive jaws and armor-plated bodies, or flies with their gauzy wings, or grasshoppers with their long jumping legs and then class them all as bugs, must seem to them incomprehensible, for to be a bug, an insect must have a sharp pointed beak, whatever else it has. It may or may not have wings, it may have a larval stage or it may not, but if it hasn't a beak and can't suck then it can't be classed as a true bug.

These sucking insects of many shapes, although directly connected with the welfare of the human race, have been, until recently, the least known of the great orders of insects.

To this order belong the chinch bugs, the cause of an estimated loss to the grain growers of twenty million dollars a year; the great Phylloxera, which destroyed the vines on three million acres of French vineyards, and the San José scale, which has spread during the past ten years through every state and territory in the United States and become a menace to the fruit-growing industry.

It is of this order of the insect world that David Sharp remarks "... if any thing were to exterminate the enemies of Hemiptera we ourselves would probably be starved in a few months." It does seem strange in face of all these statements of authority that our best friends, the insectivorous birds, are being killed out for lack of forest refuge. We spend millions to fight the pests when once they get the upper hand, but pay little or no attention to the comforts of those tireless workers, the birds, which would keep them down.

I am ashamed of such a fragmentary picture showing of this most important order, and hope someone will follow on with a bug book which will do the subject justice.

THE SQUASH BUG

(_Anasa tristis_, De G.)

The smell of the squash bug is known to every country boy. The odor is emitted through openings in the abdomen from special stink glands, which vary with each species.

The tough external skeleton explains, perhaps, why no spray is strong enough to kill the fully grown insects without also injuring the young squash and pumpkin vines, and why the best method of prevention consists in screening the young plants with a wire screen until they have grown large enough to be immune from attack. If you can find the young insects which are not yet encased in such a hardened shell, spraying with a 10 per cent kerosene emulsion will stop up their breathing pores and asphyxiate them.

The one in the picture is an old specimen, preparing to go into winter quarters under the leaves and wait for the tender squash and pumpkin vines to appear above the ground next spring.

It is surprising how quickly they find these juicy shoots, which they pierce with their sucking beaks and upon which they lay the eggs which in a few days hatch out into a brood of small but voracious squash bugs.

A STRANGE-SHAPED BUG

(_Euschistus tristigmus_, Say)

A strange-shaped bug walked into the laboratory to have his picture taken, not willing, evidently, that he should be left out of the collection. The handbooks on entomology which I possess seem not to have heard of him. He is just a common, ordinary bug, but he, doubtless, has an interesting life for all our scorning of his acquaintance.

A QUEER, UNWORLDLY MONSTER

(_Corynocoris distinctus_, Dallas)

Could anything be more antediluvian and unworldly than this old, broken-down creature, with six crooked legs, a pair of popping-out eyes, two shining ocelli which look straight up into the air, and a long, stout beak that is partly hidden behind one of the fore legs?

A discussion of how such a fright of a thing came into existence leads one into the realms of evolutionary science, and there we should perhaps find it suggested that it is so ugly and looks so much like the bark of the trees on which it roosts that birds have passed its ancient forefather by, and through the weird workings of that little-understood law of heredity this thorny, spotted creature has waddled along year after year, keeping up in the race for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of centuries. I cannot help exhibiting a little of the showman's pride in it; for, as Barnum would say, this is positively the first real appearance of this century-hidden, hoary monster before the everyday public.

According to the books, this species belongs to a strange family, in which are even more remarkable-looking creatures. They are all, however, characterized by having the femora of their back legs covered with knobs or spines. One of the species is so spiny all over its back that the male makes use of it to carry around the freshly laid eggs of the female.

THE THREAD-LEGGED BUG

(_Emesa longipes_, De G.)

When you consider how slight a jar of a spider's web will bring its maker running swiftly across the web, it is interesting to be told that this thread-legged bug has the temerity to pick off insects from a spider's web. It is plain that he stands on stilts, and with his powerful tong-like front legs, which end in spiny gripping hands, he must, I imagine, reach out across the web and pick the smaller insects from it, for he is much too small and weak and incredibly fragile to fight a spider on its own web.

Even to someone fairly familiar with the insect world he might easily be mistaken for a mantis, but his short, sharp beak, bent backwards under his chin, puts him among the bugs, where he takes his place beside the assassin bugs.

In one form of thread-legged bug in South America, it is said that the young larva is so long and slender that it curls itself around the mother's body and is carried about with her, papoose-like, on her back.

THE ASSASSIN BUG

(_Pselliopus cinctus_, Fab.)

The human species puts its assassins into striped clothing and it is a rather curious coincidence to find in the insect world an assassin bug in convict's stripes.

I think no visitor to our portrait gallery has seen a more fantastic being than this little bow-legged beast. Until I found out what he was, I could not understand his rank impertinence, for he stalked leisurely about as though afraid of nothing.

I wonder if he has a nasty flavor and advertises the fact by his curious coat.

AN ASSASSINATION

(_Pselliopus cinctus_, Fab.)

I once took a photograph, without realizing it, of some Arab women at the gates of Bagdad, trying to assassinate an old man; and I cannot pass the picture in my album without shuddering.

This photograph affects me in the same way, for it, too, is of a real tragedy and portrays the death of a ladybird, one of the few friends man has in the whole order of beetles, and that, too, at the hands of a member of the order of bugs, the most destructive order of our insect pests.

It must be admitted that, as things go in Nature, the ladybird has met her just fate, for she has spent her life devouring bugs, the sucking aphids and scale insects of our rose bushes and cherry trees. Somehow the old nursery rhyme of

"Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home,
Your house is on fire, your children will burn,"

seems to have endeared to us all this beneficent little beetle which wanders everywhere, cutting short the lives of the sap-sucking insects that deform and injure our plants, and it does not seem to matter that this particular assassin bug preys upon our enemies as well as on our friends. To find this convict striped, spiny bug, with its beak buried to the base in the vitals of the ladybird, and realize that it had first poisoned its victim with poison saliva and was now sucking its blood, rouses a peculiar feeling of hatred towards this hideously ugly creature. Perhaps this is heightened by the contrast between the pretty, trim form of the ladybird and the ugliness of the assassin bug.

I was puzzled to know how a creature so nearly armor-clad could be successfully attacked by a soft-bodied bug of such deliberate habits of movement. How the start is made I do not know, but it is evident that between the base of the wing covers of the ladybird and her neck or thorax is a weak spot in her armor and the assassin thrusts his beak into this crack.

There are members of this assassin bug class which do not hesitate to attack little children in the South, and produce nasty wounds with their poisoned beaks.

THE CICADA

(_Cicada sayi_, Grossb.)

The coming of the swallow is scarcely more significant to Americans of the Southern states than the arrival of the cicada. Its song is the noisiest song in the insect world, and is made in a curious way, by the stretching and relaxing of a corrugated drum-like membrane in the side of the abdomen by means of specially strong muscles. The sound is controlled in rhythmic cadences by means of semicircular discs or covers to the drums, which can be closed and opened at the will of the insect.

This noisy song, which the male alone can sing, he doubtless sings for his mate and not for us, although entomologists are not agreed as to how his partner hears his song, as she seems to have no ears. Although this is the photograph of a two-year cicada the story can be told here of that weirdest of all the insects,--the Rip Van Winkle of the insect world, as David Sharp has called it,--the seventeen-year cicada.

From a tiny egg laid by its mother in a twig of your back-yard shrubbery there issues a creature which is as unlike this monster as it can be, with soft, white body and mole-like front legs. It hurries to the ground and disappears beneath its surface sometimes to a depth of a hundred times its length--twenty feet it is said. For seventeen years it digs its way around in the absolute darkness of this underworld, and then, as though by some prearranged agreement, it comes to the surface to join in a marriage revelry of a few brief weeks in summer with its kinsmen of the same generation who disappeared as it did into the darkness seventeen years before.

Most insects live for a few months only, and one, indeed, the male at least, for only fifteen or twenty minutes; but the seventeen-year cicada, the oldest of the insect world, lives as long as a cat or dog. But what a life! Seventeen years of it in the dark and a few weeks in the sunlight. And yet, compared to the life of an angleworm, condemned to the darkness forever, what an interesting career!

When the cicada's shrill song disturbs you, then remember how brief is the pleasure of its existence.

THE AMBUSH BUG

(_Phymata pennsylvanica_, Handl.)

We are personally so afraid of a bee's sting that it is hard for us to believe that any mere bug exists which is strong enough to overcome and kill a wasp or honey bee. A look at the thick armor of this creature and its powerful, black pointed beak will go a long way towards convincing one that this may be such a bug; it has a close relative, anyway, which does so. Its front legs have been developed into enormously strong claws with which to catch and hold its prey.

It lurks in flowers and preys on honey-sucking insects, and one can easily imagine the unequal struggle between it and a butterfly, or realize that it might come off victor in a fight with bees or wasps.

There are such romantic scenes and bloodcurdling spectacles to be observed in this world of insects that I cannot understand why there are so few who, having ample time, have not the patience to sit and watch them as Fabre and others less well known have done.

No schoolroom training in observation can compare in value with the outdoor observations of living insects. To look and wait and think and try to understand; what habits of observation, perseverance and reflection these actions cultivate!

A BUG THAT IS ALWAYS WALKING AROUND

(_Brochymena arborea_, Say)

No photograph in the collection illustrates better the marvelous variety of form which abounds in the jungle of our back yards. To the naked eye all the interesting details are invisible and one's hand instinctively brushes the intruder from the table where it has crawled in to take a look at a human being.

The spotted, crablike legs, covered with bristles, the beadlike facet eyes, the oyster shell shaped body, the moving antennæ all covered with white scales, the curious trunk or sucking pipe descending from the chin, give to the creature a personality which combines something of the wistful with the curious. And yet this is, as my friend Dr. Schwartz says, "just one of those bugs that is always walking around on our plants and nobody seems to know just what it is doing."

THE TARNISHED PLANT BUG

(_Lygus pratensis_, Linn.)

If you have ever carefully tended young vegetable plants, set them out by hand and watched over them, you will certainly have made the acquaintance of this vicious little creature a quarter of an inch long. At least you will have found where he drove his proboscis and sucked the juices from your tender plant, leaving his irritating fluids behind to distort the tissues of the leaf or bud. He lives in the rubbish which was left littering up the garden and is waiting now for spring to come when he will make his appearance and do whatever damage is necessary for his existence. You cannot spray him with kerosene for he is too agile, skipping away from you in the sunlight, but when his mate lays her eggs, and the young nymphs with wingless bodies crawl about, you can kill them with a dose of kerosene oil emulsion which will close their breathing pores and suffocate them.

THE LANTERN FLY BUG

(_Helicoptera variegata_, Van D.)

This creature belongs to the family of lantern flies and is also related to the little leaf hoppers which one startles from the grass by the hundred in walking across a lawn or meadow.

It is a small, grey bug, not a quarter of an inch long, and quite insignificant when looked at with the naked eye, yet it is quite as strange in form as any of the prehistoric monsters.

Its powerful beak is made up, as are the beaks of all the great order of sucking insects, of four hairlike bodies, four fine, flexible, closely connected rods enclosed in a narrow groove and sharp enough to puncture the skin of a succulent young plant. Not only are these hairlike rods as sharp as needles, but the outer pair are usually barbed so that, once introduced, a hold is easily maintained.

Under the throat is an organ of the nature of a force pump which injects an irritating fluid into the plant. It is supposed that this gives rise to an irritation or congestion of the plant tissue, and thus keeps up a supply of liquid food for the bug at the point operated upon, which, rising by capillary attraction along the grooved rods, finds its way into the stomach of the insect.

That these leaf-sucking insects inject a poison is shown by the way in which the punctured leaves curl up, turn brown and die.

THE BEETLES

(_Coleoptera_)

Beetles are distinguished from the other orders of flying creatures by having the first pair of wings changed into shells under which the other pair can be safely folded and laid away. You can usually recognize them when they spread their wings to fly, for they have to raise their wing covers in order to do so. Also they generally have prominent jaws, as they are biting creatures and do not suck the juices of plants and animals as the bugs do.

Beetles are almost everywhere. You cannot turn over a stone or break down a stump or roll over a log without disturbing some of them, and yet perhaps less is known about the lives of beetles than about those of any other of the great orders of insects.

They lead two lives, distinct as two lives can be: one in the form of a grub, the other as a full-grown beetle. To make the transformation, they burrow into the ground or into the wood of trees and but rarely make for themselves silken cocoons such as the butterfly larvæ spin.

They do not lead so aerial an existence as some other orders, but, nevertheless, they are today, perhaps because of their closely fitting outer shells, the predominant order of insects of the present epoch and already there are known the bewildering number of 150,000 species. In North America alone (Mexico excepted) 12,000 species have been described and these have been grouped into eighty families and 2,000 genera. The general public is beginning to realize that not everyone can be an entomologist, and that the quality of brains and training required before one can travel safely among this maze of forms and distinguish between the friends and foes of our agriculture is a quality of the greatest value to mankind.

So far as man is concerned, this gigantic class of creatures is among the most destructive with which we divide life on this planet, and though there are beetle friends which help us by preying on other beetles and by making humus out of leaves and twigs, and by feeding millions of our song birds, yet, as a whole, they represent a restless, armored multitude which perhaps we should be just as well without.

THE JUNE BEETLE

(_Allorhina nitida_, Linn.)

In looking at these two strange beings (this picture and the next), we cannot feel confident that science has gone very far in giving us the reasons for the things we see. They seem no more alike than fish and tortoise or bird and quadruped and yet, before our very eyes, in one brief year, the one turns into the other.

This beetle dies, and leaves behind a hundred little cells, parts of its own body and the body of its mate. These paired cells, the fertilized eggs, grow rapidly into the form of the clumsy, helpless grub which feeds upon the leaves, only to break up and form themselves again into this armor-plated creature of the beetle world.

There must be something as radically wrong with our individualistic ideas of today as there was with the conception of a flat world which prevailed before the time of Columbus. Perhaps if we stop trying to think of these manifestations of beetle life as individuals and think of them as parts of one great organism scattered over the surface of the earth, these striking differences will seem no stranger to us than do the differences in the various stages of a flower's life. The beetle forms inside the grub and the tulip flower bud forms inside the bulb. If tulip flowers could fly, we should then have the strange spectacle of the opening of the scale-covered tulip bulb and the coming forth of the gorgeous colored flower which sailed away to shed its seeds in someone else's garden. I think that this is the way we must look at it if we would get a clear idea of this strangest of phenomena,--metamorphosis.

THE JUNE BEETLE LARVA

(_Allorhina nitida_, Linn.)

How is it possible that this fat creature, with eye-like breathing pores along its body, whose legs are worthless, and which is so helpless that it has to turn over on its back to wriggle over the ground, can change into the emerald-green June beetle which wings its way like an aerodrome across the meadow? This is the apparent miracle of metamorphosis which it has well-nigh baffled the intellect of man to explain.

Though the reasons for it are still unknown, modern research has shown us how this incredible change has taken place.

When this creature, which has grown a hundred times its size since it was born, has reached the age for this great change, it doubtless feels the impending transformation coming, and instinct tells it to crawl away into some protected nook or corner and pupate underneath the protection of a silken coverlid of its own spinning.

The change begins; each organ goes to pieces, disintegrates, becomes a mass of disconnected cells, so that the body filled with these, becomes, as it were, a bag of mush. This mushy fluid has been likened by entomologists to the disintegrated tissues which inflammation causes in our own bodies. If, then, you should slit it open at this stage, you would find no alimentary canal, no salivary glands, no muscles, simply a thick fluid, with here and there a thicker lump, that is attached at certain places to the inside of the sac wall. These lumps are formed of groups of active cells which were not disintegrated in the general breakdown of the muscle tissue, and these form the nuclei around which the new creature is to be built. These groups of cells grow rapidly, feeding on the fluid mass of broken-down tissue much as a young chick inside the egg feeds on the yolk, and builds up the whole complicated structure of the winged beetle, which seems to have no possible relations to the white grub out of whose body it was made.

It is as though the insect hatched twice, first from the almost microscopic egg its mother laid and from which it emerged as a tiny little creature in the image of this grub, growing and manufacturing from the leaves it eats enough nitrogenous matter so that when it emerges again from the yolk-like substance of its cocoon it will be a full-grown beetle, for it must be remembered that once made the beetle never grows.

This wonderful process is the same which is gone through by every flying insect that has a grub or caterpillar stage.

ONE OF THE JUNE BUGS OR MAY BEETLES

(_Lachnosterna quercus_, Knoch)

Of the wild creatures of our back yards, none is better known than this hard-shelled buzzing creature, which whirs into the circle of light around your lamp and commits suicide, if you will let it, by flying into the flame.

It is one of the so-called June bugs, or May beetles, which every boy and girl knows, and is not the June _beetle_ of which the larva was shown previously.

Its hard, pitted skeleton covers it completely, and it is most interesting to watch it open its wing covers with great deliberation, unfold the wings which are carefully stowed away beneath them, and holding its wing covers elevated so they will not interfere, start the transparent wings into motion and fly away with the whir of a miniature aerodrome. Indeed, it was this resemblance which caused the members of the Aerial Experiment Association to name one of their first aerodromes after it, and the first trophy ever given for an aerodrome flight was won by Curtis's "June Bug."

This creature's first life is spent beneath the sod of your lawn, where it curls up around the roots of the grasses and clover and other plants which you do not want it to eat, and the first year of its subterranean existence it is the white grub, with the brown head, which everybody knows. At the end of the second summer of its life it changes to a soft brown beetle, which throughout the winter is hardening its shell preparatory to coming out in late spring as a winged creature to feed upon the leaves of trees. The beetle which is walking toward you lives upon the oak.

ONE OF THE TWIG-PRUNERS

(_Elaphidion atomaricum_, Dru.)

The long-horned beetles, as they are called, are remarkable for the length of their antennæ and for their eyes of many facets, which almost encircle the antennæ at their base. They have, like other beetles, two lives, so to speak, and their grub-life is spent inside some twig or branch, burrowing and living on the juices which their stomachs extract from the sawdust made by their jaws. They kill the twig they burrow in, so that the wind blows it to the ground, and they go through their transformation on the ground. The story is told of a long-horned beetle, belonging to a different species, that lived for years in its larval stage, burrowing patiently into the dry wood of a boot-last or shoe-stretcher, trying vainly to get enough nourishment out of it to make a beetle of itself.

THE PREDACEOUS GROUND BEETLE

(_Chlænius æstivus_, Say)

This creature almost anyone will recognize as a beetle. It is built for running, and its jaws are made for fighting. You have only to catch one and watch it open and shut its jaws to realize that it would bite you if it could. But for all that it is a great friend, for it is what the entomologists call predaceous, and at night or at twilight it hunts everywhere for the larvæ of insects which attack the plants we live on. In its larval state, in which it looks for all the world like a centiped without the "ped," it burrows in the ground in search of the plant destroyers, which think to escape notice by getting under the cover of the soil. It is by nature, then, opposed to the vegetarians, the herbivores, and hunts them wherever they are likely to occur.

When you see a black or dark-brown beetle running swiftly from under some stone or log whirls you have just turned over and which makes faces with its jaws as though it would chew your fingers when you pick it up, you can be quite sure in eight times out of ten that it is one of these carabidæ or predaceous ground beetles, and if you let it drop from your fingers you may be saving the life of a friend, because some day it may eat the worm which, lying close to some pet flower of yours, had planned to cut it off beneath the ground.