126 The Book of Bugs. 



The New Psychologists probably feel that they 

 knocked the bull off the bridge when they traced our de- 

 scent to the fishes, but I am not devoid of a certain 

 amount of bull-knocking ability myself. Have you ever 

 noticed that when a young couple get taken down with 

 an acute attack of the real, old-fashioned lovesickness- 

 I don't mean a mild form of the modern varioloid, but 

 the genuine puppy-love where it strikes in and breaks 

 out again in a rash of poetry, and the patient is slightly 

 delirious, and keeps asking, " Who do you love? Huh? 

 Whose lovey-dovey is oo? ' Did you ever notice, I say, 

 how inhibitory this affection is of the normal appetite. 

 Why, the two of them don't eat as much as would feed a 

 bird. And even when the symptoms are less pronounced 

 neither of them dares to do more than pick a trifle in the 

 presence of the other, so that for appearance' sake they 

 are obliged to fill up at home with something substantial, 

 so as to seem to the Adored One each to be a delicate 

 feeder? One of our standard jokes is about the young 

 man that takes his beloved to the restaurant, where she 

 eats him poor. By that joke we are instructed that the 

 Eating Girl, when in love, is a ridiculous monstrosity, 

 and not at all the proper person for a respectable young 

 man to marry. I submit that the analogy between the 

 human male and female in the period of courtship when 

 little is eaten, and the male and female clothes-moth in 

 the same period when nothing at all is eaten, establishes 

 with almost mathematical certainty that the human race 

 is descended from the Tineid branch of the Lepidoptera, 

 or mealy-winged insects. 



Watch a growing boy at the table, and ask yourself 

 seriously if his behavior is not to be accounted for by the 

 persistence of that instinct that in former ages warned 

 him that he had better eat while he had a chance. 



