CHAPTER X 



THE TRUE BUGS, CICADAS, APHIDS, SCALE- 

 INSECTS, ETC. (Order Hemiptera), AND THE 

 THRIPS (Order Thysanoptera) 



WHEN an Englishman says "bug" and 

 he doesn't say it in polite society he 

 means that particular sort of bug which 

 we more specifically speak of as bedbug; 

 when we say "bug" we are likely to mean any insect 

 of any order; but when a professed student of insects, 

 an entomologist, says or writes bug, he means some 

 member of the insect order Hemiptera. It is to this 

 order of "bugs" that we have now come in our system- 

 atic consideration of insects, and it is in this order that 

 we first meet conspicuously the difficulties of treating 

 systematically the populous insect class. From now 

 on the making of this book useful depends on the discriminating selection 

 of the few kinds of insects whose special consideration the limits of 

 text and illustration permit, leaving the great majority. of species to be 

 referred to comprehensively and vaguely as the "others." 



The Hemiptera, or true bugs, make up a large order compared with any 

 of those so far considered, although a smaller one than certain others yet to be 

 taken up. As regards popular acquaintanceship and interest also this 

 order is still more inferior to the other large ones, namely, the beetles, the 

 moths and butterflies, the two-winged flies, and the ants, bees, and wasps. 

 Most of the true bugs are small, and obscurely, or at least inconspicuously, 

 colored, and few of them attract that attention necessary to gain popular 

 interest. 



The order Hemiptera includes over 5000 known species of North 

 American insects, representing a large variety and a great economic impor- 

 tance; some of the most destructive crop pests and most discomforting insect- 

 scourges of man and the domestic animals belong to this order. The 

 chinch-bug's ravages in the corn- and wheat-fields of the Mississippi Valley 

 offer effective evidence to the dismayed farmers of the workings of a dis- 

 pleased Providence; the tiny sap-sucking aphids and phylloxera and insig- 



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