212 The Book of Bugs. 



hankering. We cannot endure to hear a story told twice, 

 but that is exactly what a child wants, and not twice only, 

 but over and over again, word for word and intonation 

 for intonation. 



I feel sure that children would make far more progress 

 taking up one study after another and keeping to each 

 until the book was finished than they do now. It is this 

 skipping about from one thing to another and halloo- 

 ing 'Whoa!' in almost the same breath as " Geet ep 

 there! " that plays hob with our powers of concentration 

 and keeps us from sticking at anything until we conquer 

 it. See what our system of education has brought me 

 to. Let that be a lesson to you. 



Yes, sir, I fully intended as much as anything could be 

 to write a whole chapter on Locusts, Grasshoppers, and 

 Crickets. I had another planned on the Colorado 

 potato-beetle, showing that it could cipher as far as 

 decimals, because it has ten stripes on its back. I was 

 going to write another chapter on Guerrillas of the 

 Garden, which T have been assured by a very competent 

 authority is an extremely taking title, and you know 

 that if you have a nice front stoop to your house it is half 

 the battle. In this chapter I was going to stretch a point 

 and bring in the enemies of shade-trees, and the way they 

 put tents over orange-trees and kill off the San Jose scale 

 by generating hydrocyanic acid, a gas that will kill you 

 as quick as wink if you get a good whiff of it. But while 

 there are a good many words in a book, it has its respect- 

 able limits, and I had to stop sometime. 



You can see for yourself, though, what a chance I had 

 in that Grasshopper chapter. When I say grasshopper, 

 I do not mean the grasshopper that you mean, which is 

 the locust, and the locust that you mean is the seventeen- 

 year locust, which is a bug, and not a locust. It is a 



