FIELD BOOK OF INSECTS. 



ORTHOPTERA 



For the sake of simplicity, and to conform with other 

 books you may see, we will include roaches, mantids, and 

 walking sticks in this order, calling them families, although 

 good authorities consider each of them to be a separate 

 order. The earwigs were formerly classed as Orthop- 

 tera but are now generally conceded the rank of an 

 order. All have incomplete metamorphosis. A useful 

 paper for students in the Northeast is by B. H. Walden, 

 Bull. No. 1 6, State Geol. and Nat. Hist. Survey of 

 necticut. 



BLATTID^E 



These are the Roaches. I like the spirit in which 

 Sutherland views these none too well liked creatures: 

 "If the test of nobility is antiquity of family, then the 

 cockroach that hides behind the kitchen sink is the true 

 aristocrat. He does not date back merely to the three 

 brothers that came over in 1640 or to William the 

 queror. Wherever there have been great epoch-making 

 movements of people he has been with them heart and 

 soul, without possessing any particular religious convic- 

 tions or political ambitions. It is not so much that he 

 approves of their motives as that he likes what they have 

 to eat. Since ever a ship turned a foamy furrow in the 

 sea he has been a passenger, not a paying one certainly, 

 but still a passenger. But man himself is but a creature 

 of the last twenty minutes or so compared with the cock- 

 roach, for, from its crevice by the kitchen sink, it can 

 point its antennae to the coal in the hod and say: 'When 

 that was being made my family was already wel 

 established.'" 



This hyphenate was named by Linnaeus 

 Blattella long before the war and he probably did not 



germanica mean tQ insinuate anything, although 



certain "scientific gents" have played such tricks. As a 



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