io6 The Book of Bugs. 



except the conductor. He sits down and becomes unin- 

 teresting, after that. It was a great thing that the 

 Chinese should so early in history have invented an ideo- 

 graphic system of picture-writing, that was a great deal 

 better than no system at all; but that early success has 

 made their literary intercommunication with the rest of 

 the world impossible. That and the virtue of our friend 

 Josh that was always the same, no matter when or where 

 you found him. Not onlv nations, but individuals, have 



*< 



paid terrible penalties for succeeding too young. There 

 is one writer in particular but no, I will not join the 

 pack of jackals that yap at him. He may yet make 

 good the dazzling promise of his youth. 



It is from men that have ceased to grow and have lost 

 their power to accommodate themselves to changing 

 conditions that I derive my conception of the mental atti- 

 tude of the cockroach. I seem to see the lady cock- 

 roaches especially contemptuous of other insects that 

 skite around and let their children grow up just anyhow. 

 'Call themselves mothers! 1 snorts a matronly Pcripla- 

 ncta oricntalis, her long antennae quivering with disgust 

 a such carryings-on. ' Pretty mothers they are! All 

 they seem to think they've got to do is to lay eggs by the 

 hundred and then go gallivanting off, trusting to luck 

 that some of them will hatch out. Mothers? Huh! Huz- 

 zies, I call 'em." 



The mosquito may launch her silvery boat of forty 

 dozen eggs on the still pool in the early morning and 

 then sing the happy hours away till evening comes and 

 foolish people go out on the front stoop, but the mother 

 of cockroaches remembers what it says in the autograph 

 album about sleeping and dreaming that Life is Beauty 

 and waking up and finding that Life is Duty. She lays 

 only sixteen eggs, and does them up neatly in a nice sort 



