216 The Book of Bugs. 



do something- for the minor characters, thus: " As for our 

 friends, Harry and Frank, they are still plodding along 

 in their uneventful career as humble aeronauts"; or 

 " Little Boy Blue is now employed as a copy-reader on a 

 great metropolitan daily, and often recalls the happy 

 days when," etc., etc., summing up whole lives in one 

 sentence. So also in this chapter I have compressed 

 into a few words the mention of insects that really should 

 have been spread out over many pages. 



However I may have wandered about, to one idea I 

 have stuck, though perhaps I have not made it as plain 

 as I might, and that is, the essential oneness of the whole 

 visible universe. There is not much of it I can under- 

 stand, and it may be that I do not understand that 

 aright, and yet it seems to me that, as it were, through a 

 glass darkly, I catch some glimpse of thoughtful organi- 

 zation. I will not say " plan," for that is a belittling 

 woird. One plans that barely can accomplish what he 

 sets out to do, and must scheme and contrive or fail com- 

 pletely, a species of Atheism I have no stomach for. 

 Then, too, if a plan is discernible at all, it is by the end 

 the planner would achieve. To what purpose is this 

 world made? Who can tell? Some there are can say 

 the answer off the book. I should like to be a little 

 surer that they really know. They seem to me to be at 

 fault in that they assume that one animal, relatively 

 scarce, of few varieties and but a single species, is wholly 

 set apart from the innumerable myriads of other moving 

 things instinct with life. Body and soul, they say, he is 

 so wonderful a piece of work it were too great a pity to 

 be true that he should not perdure through all the ages, 

 long after the sun itself has chilled to a cold cinder in 

 the sky, while these others perish and are no more seen. 

 And yet the bodies of these others are not less admirably 



