76 The Book of Bugs. 



yet I have classed them with flies and traced their 

 probable relationship to flies, because there is much in 

 their structure that resembles the one-pair-of-wings sort 

 of insects. 



There are other bloodthirsty wild beasts about the 

 house, but to consider them rightly we have to take a 

 glance at another order, the half (hciui) winged (ptera) 

 or Hemiptera, which modern entomology classes as true 

 bugs. Now that is a name we apply to almost any small 

 boneless living creature. Physicians jokingly speak of 

 microbes by that name. In common conversation we 

 call it a " ladybug," but, if we are going to be accurate, it 

 is really a beetle. And the gray thing that lives under 

 damp boards and curls itself up into a ball, which we call 

 a " pill-bug," and which negro nurses give to women in 

 child-bed to swallow, is even farther away from a bug, 

 being a kind of shell-fish gone astray from the sounding 

 sea ; a pitifully degenerate descendant of the fine old 

 trilobites whose beautiful fossils, nearly two feet long, we 

 used to pass around in geology class for inspection. 



Speaking of degeneration, the name "bug' itself is a 

 melancholy example of the reverses of fortune that come 

 to words, for man that made them is lord over them and 

 hath brought down the mighty from their seats and 

 exalted them that were of low degree. Thanks to Max 

 Miiller, the pleasing fantasy is yet believed that nearly 

 all the nations from Ireland to India are of one blood, 

 because a family resemblance can be traced in their speech. 

 It was confidently asserted that from somewhere in the 

 table-lands of Persia successive waves of immigration 

 rolled outward, each wave pushing its predecessor before 

 it. You remember that in the last chapter I bade you 

 beware of theories and explanations that fit too well and 

 look too reasonable, After the first enthusiasm, people 



