THE MOTHER SPIDER AND HER NEST: A NURSERY OF LITTLE CANNIBALS
This mother belongs to the nursery-web weavers. She wove a silken bag for her eggs and carried it about with her under her body until she found a suitable place to leave it. She had to stand on tiptoes to prevent its dragging—it was so big.
The photograph shows the spiderlings hatched and running about, hundreds of them, over the fine-spun mass of silk.
In these nurseries the strong eat up the weak.
A VAGABOND SPIDER
(Pardosa milvina, Hentz)
This is a vagabond of the spider world, building no nest or web, content to use her marvelous silk in the construction only of a sac in which to lay her eggs. This sac she carries about with her until the eggs have hatched and the spiderlings are strong enough to take care of themselves, and then she rips open the sac along a distinct seam on the edge and turns her babies loose to shift for themselves.
These voracious little cannibals have, however, already learned to forage, as the struggle for existence in many species of spiders begins in the egg sac, and it is only the strongest who emerge. In other words, they eat each other up.
They do not grow to be more than half an inch in length, but they are among the most active of all spiders, and in the United States alone there are nearly a score of species of these little soldiers of fortune living nowhere and roaming the damp fields in search of prey.
THE MALE GRASS SPIDER
(Agelina nævia, Walck.)
On a summer morning, if you rise with the sun, and if the night has been cool, you will find your lawn covered with most exquisite shimmering gossamer patches, so diaphanous that if you touch them or breathe on them they fade away. These are the webs of the young grass spiders and, if you watch one of them closely, you will see that the tiny spider is waiting below the web in a funnel of woven spider’s silk. It will run out quickly enough if you throw a fly into its net. It is not an orb-weaver and runs over its net instead of climbing along the under side of it as many orb-weavers do.
That this is the photograph of a mature male is evident from the genital palpi, resembling a pair of short front legs.
In the autumn the males and females both desert their webs to wander, for it is not only their mating season but the close of their brief existence. Under a bit of bark the female lays her eggs and waits for death, guarding her progeny till she dies, although she has no hope of seeing them alive.
How, by what marvelous machinery, do these microscopic eggs beneath the bark inherit, not only the color and the form but the knowledge of web building which their dead parents possessed? Is there not something wrong in our idea of the individual as a separate thing rather than as a transitory part of a living network which has been in existence perhaps a million years, alternating in its form, now as a moving hairy-legged thing, and now as a round immobile egg?
THE CRAB SPIDER THAT LURKS AROUND THE NECTARIES OF FLOWERS
(Xysticus gulosus, Keys.)
Like the beasts of prey which lurk around the water holes of African deserts, waiting for the feebler game to come down to drink, the crab spiders conceal themselves around the nectar-bearing discs of flowers. These nectar cups are the feeding places of thousands of sucking creatures, and the tragedies which take place in the shadows of the rose or lily petals are things we do not like to think of, for they are quite as real, quite as horrible and bloody struggles as those upon a larger scale, the very thought of which makes our blood run cold.
The crab spiders cannot run forward but dart sidewise and backward at great speed. One cannot help wondering if this ability may not often be an advantage rather than a drawback and enable the creature to surprise its prey by turning its back on it, something as a left-handed man often surprises an antagonist.
That these spiders run their own grave risks in this life around the nectar “water holes” is evident, for they form a large proportion of the food of mud wasps and if you want a handful of them, tear down a few mud daubers’ nests sometime in June and empty out their contents. The brilliant colors will surprise you and suggest that possibly the yellow ones haunt the yellow flowers and the blue the blue ones.
The particular species whose low, sprawling form is shown in the photograph is one of forty occurring in the United States and, although it is only from a fourth to a third of an inch long, is considered one of the large species. It is dull-colored, and, unlike its gaily-colored relatives, awaits its prey under bark and stones.
It spins no web and the small male leads a thoroughly vagabond life, whereas the female, in most species at least, settles down toward the end of her life and, after depositing her silken lens-shaped sac of eggs in some protected spot, she lingers near as if to guard it till she dies.
A FRONT VIEW OF A MATURE MALE SPIDER
The reason for existence is so perplexing that it is no wonder we fall back on mysticism whenever we try to explain it.
Inexplicable as it seems when we consider our own lot as humans, the mystery is no less great when we try to view existence from the standpoint of a male spider.
Is it not probable that we cling so dearly to the idea of our own existence as individuals that we forget we are only halves of a whole, and that the whole itself is only a fraction of that vague living something spread out over the earth, moving in millions of places at once which we call a living species?
When we shall have shifted our sympathies and made them cover a thousand generations of beings, we shall have risen to the point of view that a divinity must take.
The enigmas of existence, I venture to say, will only be understood from this standpoint and not from the more sympathetic one of regret over the shortness, cruelty or barrenness of any individual’s life.
The male spider seems peculiarly to be just a tool in the machinery of descent, merely a carrier of the male germ cells which, whenever, and not before, they come in contact with their female counterparts, start into activity the marvelous growth which results in new individuals similar to itself.
These male cells which form within its body, mature, and are ejected as living, ciliated things into a web of special make; and two special syringes formed late in life at the tips of the leg-like palpi draw them up and hold them stored until it is time for them to be injected during the mating process into special sacs within the female, where they fuse in some strange way with female cells and start the following generation.
His palpi once emptied of these male cells, of what further use to the species can he be and why should not the carnivorous female promptly eat him up?
THE DADDY-LONG-LEGS OR HARVESTMAN
(Leiobunum grande, Weed)
Who has not watched daddy-long-legs stalk majestically across the floor or up the wall, one long slender leg waving in front of him like the arm of some gesticulating prophet of old? Indeed, the fly or mosquito is hardly more familiar.
Long-leggedness is all relative to size of body, and viewed from this standpoint everyone must agree that the harvestman is the longest-legged creature in the world. If its body were the size of a flamingo its legs would cover over thirty feet of ground. As it has eight legs and each leg is eight times the length of its body it has sixty-four times as much length of leg as of body.
It is a strange, spider creature having only two eyes which look to right and left from a turret-like hump in the middle of its back. Its claws in front have pincers like a crab’s. Opposite the first pair of legs are scent glands from which it pours out a fluid which has so bad an odor that it seems to protect it from its foes.
Swung low between its legs, this creature of twilight and shade wanders in search of small insects which it catches and devours as other spiders do. It only lives one season in the North and spins no web and makes no nest. The female lays her eggs deep down in the ground or under stones or in the crevices of the bark of trees.
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.