124 



The Book of Bugs. 



but that was long" and long ago, and clothes-moths' 

 jaws have dwindled from mere lack of exercise. 

 They kind of got out of the way of eating, perhaps 



because it took their 

 minds off what is 

 after all the most 

 interesting thing in 

 life falling in love. 

 I . am about to 

 enounce a great dis- 



Fig. 28. Tinea pellionella, the common COVCry that I have 

 clothes-moth; adult moth, larva, and larva niade all bv ITlVSelf 

 in its case. " ' 



c)O to speak, 1 have 



picked it right off my own vines. I am led to it by 

 analogy, which, I may say here, is the most accommodat- 

 ing thing yet invented by man when he wishes to make 

 positive statements upon a subject of which he knows 

 nothing whatever. You can prove anything by analogy 

 if it isn't carried too far. The great thing is to know 

 where " too far " is, which is generally where the analogy 

 begins to disprove what it has just proved. It is one of 

 the crowning glories of the New Psychology that certain 

 human traits and abnormalities have been properly re- 

 ferred, not merely to the apes and monkeys, but further 

 back oh, much further back than that. Say, to 

 fishes. Perhaps you have wondered why it is that we 

 are so fond of swimming, when it is an exercise very 

 distasteful to monkeys, and presumably to our simian 

 ancestors. All vertebrate life starts with fishes, and 

 this hankering to go swimming, noticeable in boys, 

 who are eminently conservative of habits of mind, in- 

 stincts, if you will, is simply a harking back 'to our 

 ancientest mode of life. Each individual of us passes 

 through in his own history all the mutations that the 



